International arbitration aims to embody flexibility, neutrality, and a consensual approach for expedited dispute resolution between parties. However, in the wake of extensive international sanctions imposed on Russia following the events in Ukraine beginning in February 2022, sanctioned Russian parties have faced a myriad of procedural difficulties during arbitration affecting their ability to retain their counsel of choice, make financial payments, travel to in-person arbitration proceedings, and even find an impartial arbitrator.

One of the primary reasons why transnational actors prefer international arbitration over international litigation is that they anticipate that those international arbitral awards not voluntarily complied with are highly enforceable in national courts. This assumption is especially forceful with respect to U.S. federal courts. Historically, many commentators have estimated that national courts give effect to about 90% of all awards. When scholars set out to test empirically this estimated 90% rate, however, they reported finding lower rates at which national courts give effect to awards. These empirical studies all suffer from methodological shortcomings that have distorted their results.

Governments around the world have increasingly regulated nonprofits’ access to foreign funding. These regulations, which often take the form of registration requirements, are justified as needed to protect a country’s politics from undue foreign influence. Yet, they have also placed new burdens on nonprofits and been used by governments to discredit critics, creating significant new constraints on activism on issues from fighting climate change to protecting human rights. While authoritarian governments have been the most aggressive proponents of these restrictions, many democracies have also embraced variants of them, creating new uncertainty about how foreign funding of nonprofits should be regulated.

The concept of territoriality does not appear to fit very well with the limits on state power in admiralty. Territoriality refers to land while admiralty concerns itself with the sea. Limitations on state power on land require adaptation and modification to apply at sea. They must overcome the contrast, pervasive in admiralty, between the law applied on land and the law applied on navigable waters. The adaptation of territorial boundaries to the sea turns out to be a complicated process, which invariably involves multiple boundaries even along the same stretch of coastline. Maritime boundaries are largely unmarked on the fluid surface of the sea, generating multiple ambiguities and controversies. These currently have important implications in the waters ranging from the Arctic Ocean to the South China Sea.

The public is calling for an energy transition as the consequences of climate change grow increasingly difficult to mitigate. Many states are determined to use government incentives to achieve this transition. These incentives often include subsidies that are illegal under the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (ASCM) and other agreements. The bounds of these subsidies’ illegality are made unclear by inconclusive case law at the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB). In recent cases, the DSB has relied on the non-discrimination provisions of other agreements instead of the ASCM, resulting in a dearth of interpretations of the key subsidies agreement.

2023 appeared to be a historic year for LGBT rights in Japan. The Japanese legislature passed its first law acknowledging the need for understanding of the LGBT community, and the Supreme Court issued two rulings in favor of transgender plaintiffs’ rights. However, upon a closer look, all of this supposed progress is purely symbolic. The underlying legal issues remain: there is no anti-discrimination law aimed at protecting the LGBT community, same-sex marriage is not recognized, and transgender people must undergo surgery in order to legally transition. Further, in the absence of anti-discrimination law, de facto discrimination persists throughout all aspects of Japanese society. Japan can and should ensure the rights of its LGBT population by broadening the fundamental rights guaranteed within its Constitution and by enacting specific anti-discrimination legislation.