Research Overview

Much of my current research focuses on normative questions about international law, which I think of as the intersection between political philosophy, normative economics, and jurisprudence. I am currently working on a book-length project, generously supported in part by the Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada, that explores what secures the legitimacy of international law. 

In the first part of the monograph, I argue that the content of international law properly understood is non-domination rather than non-interference (contra Westphalians) as applied to states rather than persons (contra cosmopolitans). Further, its ground is neither voluntarist nor instrumentalist, but rather constitutivist. In particular, I argue that Republican Sovereignty as the non-domination of states best specifies the content of the Constitutive Norm of international law as its ground. Following Kant, this norm is one that ensures rights are peremptory rather than provisional. Departing from the aforementioned background assumption, the content and the ground thus come together to yield a single account of legitimacy. On my view, which I call Kantian Republicanism, international law is both de jure and de facto legitimate to the extent that it protects the non-domination of states: securing non-domination constitutively stipulates the de jure right to rule while exerting a high level of de facto compliance pull by way of fairness, assurance, and ownership.

In the second part, I detail practical implications for rights, wrongs, and remedies. In the case of rights, I show that contrary to intuition Kantian Republicanism is not only consistent with actual regulatory mechanisms like compulsory licensing mechanisms, but these flexibilities to claim a right are actually best justified in terms of non-domination of states rather than claims about justice. In the case of wrong, I trace the revisionary implications that the theory has for how we think about liability under international law. Drawing on these arguments in the case of remedies, I defend the view from the objection that it is incompatible with human rights doctrines like Responsibility-to-Protect by showing these doctrines—like compulsory licensing mechanisms–are best justified in terms of non-domination. 

 Please contact me for the table of contents or drafts of each chapter.