Issue 1

As the Editors-in-Chief of Ecology Law Quarterly and the Berkeley Journal of International Law, we welcome you to this special issue in honor of Professor David D. Caron ’83. This issue reflects a nearly year-long joint effort of law students in both journals coming together to publish scholarship that reflects ...

David Caron had an enormous impact on Berkeley Law School and on the field of international law. He is terribly missed. A wonderful conference was held on September 14 and 15, 2018, at Berkeley Law School to honor, remember, and celebrate David. Hundreds of people attended a moving memorial service ...

The title for our conference comes from a 2012 talk David Caron delivered at the American Society of International Law Conference when he was president of the society. Titled “Confronting Complexity, Valuing Elegance,” David urged that we approach complex legal problems with the aim of arriving at elegant solutions.

David and I were friends for over 30 years. On the professional side, I followed him as Chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration and he followed me as President of the American Society for International Law. We planned many symposia and programs together. One of the things we agreed ...

It has become a familiar trope to recite that we live in an era marked by an unprecedented growth in international courts and tribunals. Besides its empiricist overtones and familiar focus on the evolution of international law, this ritualized incantation serves to signal the increased importance of international lawyers. An ...

David D. Caron’s scholarship on the legitimacy of international law and international institutions was ground-breaking, expansive in its reach and its impact, and elegant in its analysis, form, and structure. The questions of legitimacy that he addressed in his writing represent some of the most urgent and important matters of ...

In his lectures and scholarly writings, David Caron was fond of conjuring images. Last September, he opened a lecture in Geneva by recalling an inscription over an entrance to this law school. In his American Journal of International Law article on the 1899 Hague Peace Conference, he described a rather ...

“ISDS,” as many of you may know, stands for “Investor-State Dispute Settlement,” and refers to the current system of ad hoc arbitration that foreign investors and host States use to resolve their investment disputes. Because the system is ad hoc—in other words, the disputing parties pick the arbitrators and the ...

When it came to almost any emerging issue in international law, Professor Caron was at the forefront and, in many cases, had already written about it. We saw this with issues ranging from the minimum standard of treatment in Glamis Gold v. United States of America, in which he served ...

The theme of Berkeley Law’s September 2018 Symposium honoring the memory of Professor David Caron was “The Elegance of International Law.” This intriguing theme was taken from David’s opening address, entitled “Confronting Complexity, Valuing Elegance,” at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law in April 2012. His ...

The view that participation by the respondent state enhances the perceived legitimacy of international judicial or arbitral proceedings may play a significant role in a decision not to participate. Such a decision may be prompted by political rather than legal considerations. The object of nonparticipation may be to facilitate exercise ...

This essay offers an installment of what would have been a continuing conversation with David D. Caron, a close colleague in the field of international law, on themes that engaged both of us across multiple phases of our intersecting careers. The issues are fundamental ones for both the theory and ...

In his 2017 Charles N. Brower Lecture on International Dispute Resolution at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, David Caron considered the role of international adjudicators in dealing with the various social functions that are implicated by courts. Drawing on ideas associated with Martin Shapiro, he ...

Consistent with his approach to scholarship across the range of his concerns, Caron addressed two things (at least) at once. In the most immediate sense, he was concerned with the emergent role of “a functioning UN Security Council”— which was then (1991–93) seen as an institution bridging the end of ...

When Professor Harry Scheiber asked me to address the subject of “institutional arrangements for the ocean,” it struck me that this matter keeps coming back. This does not mean that it is irrelevant or meaningless to continue to address it. Quite the contrary.

Straits are by definition narrow waterways linking seas and the ocean which often provide significant time-saving and cost-cutting navigational routes to commercial shipping. In turn, this navigationally advantageous position can give coastal States the power to exert control over passage of international shipping by imposing regulatory conditions or even by ...

In international law as in other fields, elegance is the result of careful design, appropriateness for context, and functional performance. David Caron’s interest in thinking systematically about environmental treaty design led him to ponder the policy tools and institutions that can be created by States when they negotiate treaties.2 This ...

To be effective in shaping state conduct, the liberalism and idealism that informs public international law must contend with geopolitical realities and the role of power in the international system. David D. Caron was unafraid to address this dichotomy.1 His work bridged epistemic communities and offered concrete approaches to some ...

With the sudden death of Professor David Caron in February 2018, the field of ocean law and policy studies lost one of its most gifted and celebrated leaders. His many contributions to scholarship on oceans issues were only one segment of a large corpus of writings in which he contributed ...