case study on laws

Online Courses and Casebooks

Online courses.

These online courses are for lawyers looking to do a deep dive into a particular area, and for anyone looking to learn about how law works in practice. Offered by Harvard Law School in collaboration with Harvard’s Vice Provost for Advances in Learning and edX, these courses are part of our ongoing commitment to lifelong learning.

Contract Law: From Trust to Promise to Contract

Learn about contracts in this online course from Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, one of the world's leading authorities on contract law.

Financial Analysis and Valuation for Lawyers

Taught by Harvard Law School faculty, this Harvard Online course is designed to help you navigate your organization's or client’s financial goals while increasing profitability and minimizing risks.

Bioethics: The Law, Medicine, and Ethics of Reproductive Technologies and Genetics

An overview of the legal, medical, and ethical questions around reproduction and human genetics and how to apply legal reasoning to these questions.

Justice Today: Money, Markets, and Morals

Led by award-winning Harvard Professor Michael J. Sandel, this course will take a deep dive into various “needs” and whether they abuse market mechanisms.

Introduction to American Civics

Presented by Zero-L, this is HLS's short introduction to American Law and Civics.

The course explores the current law of copyright; the impact of that law on art, entertainment, and industry; and the ongoing debates concerning how the law should be reformed.

A networked course on patent law hosted jointly by Harvard Law School, the Berkman Klein Center on Internet and Society, and the HarvardX Distance-Learning Initiative.

HLS Executive Education Online Programs

Computer science for lawyers.

Computer Science for Lawyers will equip you with a richer appreciation of the legal ramifications of clients’ technological decisions and policies.

International Finance: Policy, Regulation, and Transactions

International Finance will give participants a framework for thinking about the policy issues that will shape the financial system of the 21st century.

Additional Online Resources

Constitutional rights in black and white.

A video casebook about the legal decisions that define and govern our constitutional rights. Each video tells the story of an important Supreme Court case, and then shows you how to read the case yourself.

Open Casebook

The case studies.

This program publishes and distributes experimental materials developed by HLS faculty for HLS courses.

Looking for more options?

Additional course offerings are available through our Executive Education and Program on Negotiation.

Executive Education Programs

Program on negotiation.

Find a Lawyer
Ask a Lawyer
Research the Law
Law Schools
Laws & Regs
Newsletters
Justia Connect
Pro Membership
Basic Membership
Justia Lawyer Directory
Platinum Placements
Gold Placements
Justia Elevate
Justia Amplify
PPC Management
Google Business Profile
Social Media
Justia Onward Blog

US Case Law

The United States Supreme Court is the highest court in the United States. Lower courts on the federal level include the US Courts of Appeals, US District Courts, the US Court of Claims, and the US Court of International Trade and US Bankruptcy Courts. Federal courts hear cases involving matters related to the United States Constitution, other federal laws and regulations, and certain matters that involve parties from different states or countries and large sums of money in dispute.

Each state has its own judicial system that includes trial and appellate courts. The highest court in each state is often referred to as the “supreme” court, although there are some exceptions to this rule, for example, the New York Court of Appeals or the Maryland Court of Appeals. State courts generally hear cases involving state constitutional matters, state law and regulations, although state courts may also generally hear cases involving federal laws. States also usually have courts that handle only a specific subset of legal matters, such as family law and probate.

Case law, also known as precedent or common law, is the body of prior judicial decisions that guide judges deciding issues before them. Depending on the relationship between the deciding court and the precedent, case law may be binding or merely persuasive. For example, a decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is binding on all federal district courts within the Fifth Circuit, but a court sitting in California (whether a federal or state court) is not strictly bound to follow the Fifth Circuit’s prior decision. Similarly, a decision by one district court in New York is not binding on another district court, but the original court’s reasoning might help guide the second court in reaching its decision.

Decisions by the US Supreme Court are binding on all federal and state courts.

US Federal Courts

Reported opinions from the us federal courts of appeals.

Federal Reporter, 2nd Series (F.2d) (1924-1993)
Federal Reporter, 3rd Series (F.3d) (1993-present)

Opinions From the US Federal Courts of Appeals

US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces
US Court of International Trade
US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review
Bankruptcy Reporter (B.R.) (1980-present)
Federal Reporter, 2nd Series (F.2d) (1924-1932)
Federal Supplement (F. Supp.) (1933-1998)
Federal Supplement, 2nd Series (F. Supp. 2d) (1998-present)
Connecticut
District of Columbia
Massachusetts
Mississippi
New Hampshire
North Carolina
North Dakota
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
West Virginia
US District Court for the District of Guam
US District Court for the District of Puerto Rico
US District Court for the District of the Northern Mariana Islands
US District Court for the District of the US Virgin Islands
Emergency Court of Appeals (1942-1974)
US Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims
US Court of Claims (1855-1982)
US Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (1909-1982)
US Court of Federal Claims
US Tax Court

State Courts

Foreign and international courts.

Australia Courts
Canada Courts
Israel Courts
United Kingdom Courts
International Courts
Bankruptcy Lawyers
Business Lawyers
Criminal Lawyers
Employment Lawyers
Estate Planning Lawyers
Family Lawyers
Personal Injury Lawyers
Estate Planning
Personal Injury
Business Formation
Business Operations
Intellectual Property
International Trade
Real Estate
Financial Aid
Course Outlines
Law Journals
US Constitution
Regulations
Supreme Court
Circuit Courts
District Courts
Dockets & Filings
State Constitutions
State Codes
State Case Law
Legal Blogs
Business Forms
Product Recalls
Justia Connect Membership
Justia Premium Placements
Justia Elevate (SEO, Websites)
Justia Amplify (PPC, GBP)
Testimonials

Library electronic resources outage May 29th and 30th

Between 9:00 PM EST on Saturday, May 29th and 9:00 PM EST on Sunday, May 30th users will not be able to access resources through the Law Library’s Catalog, the Law Library’s Database List, the Law Library’s Frequently Used Databases List, or the Law Library’s Research Guides. Users can still access databases that require an individual user account (ex. Westlaw, LexisNexis, and Bloomberg Law), or databases listed on the Main Library’s A-Z Database List.

Georgetown Law Library
Research Process

Case Law Research Guide

Introduction.

Print Case Reporters
Online Resources for Cases
Finding Cases: Digests, Headnotes, and Key Numbers
Finding Cases: Terms & Connectors Searching

Key to Icons

Georgetown only
On Bloomberg
More Info (hover)
Preeminent Treatise

Every law student and practicing attorney must be able to find, read, analyze, and interpret case law. Under the common law principles of stare decisis, a court must follow the decisions in previous cases on the same legal topic. Therefore, finding cases is essential to finding out what the law is on a particular issue.

This guide will show you how to read a case citation and will set out the sources, both print and online, for finding cases. This guide also covers how to use digests, headnotes, and key numbers to find case law, as well as how to find cases through terms and connectors searching.

To find cases using secondary sources, such as legal encyclopedias or legal treatises, see our Secondary Sources Research Guide . For additional strategies to find cases, like using statutory annotations or citators, see our Case Law Research Tutorial . Our tutorial also covers how to update cases using citators (Lexis’ Shepard’s tool and Westlaw’s KeyCite).

Basic Case Citation

A case citation is a reference to where a case (also called a decision or an opinion ) is printed in a book. The citation can also be used to retrieve cases from Westlaw and Lexis . A case citation consists of a volume number, an abbreviation of the title of the book or other item, and a page number.

The precise format of a case citation depends on a number of factors, including the jurisdiction, court, and type of case. You should review the rest of this section on citing cases (and the relevant rules in The Bluebook ) before trying to format a case citation for the first time. See our Bluebook Guide for more information.

The basic format of a case citation is as follows:

Parallel Citations

When the same case is printed in different books, citations to more than one book may be given. These additional citations are known as parallel citations .

Example: 265 U.S. 274, 68 L. Ed. 1016, 44 S. Ct. 565.

This means that the case you would find at page 565 of volume 44 of the Supreme Court Reporter (published by West) will be the same case you find on page 1016 of volume 68 of Lawyers' Edition (published by Lexis), and both will be the same as the opinion you find in the official government version, United States Reports . Although the text of the opinion will be identical, the added editorial material will differ with each publisher.

Williams Library Reference

Reference Desk : Atrium, 2nd (Main) Floor (202) 662-9140 Request a Research Consultation

Case law research tutorial.

Update History

Revised 4/22 (CMC) Updated 10/22 (MK) Links 07/2023 (VL)

Next: Print Case Reporters >>
© Georgetown University Law Library. These guides may be used for educational purposes, as long as proper credit is given. These guides may not be sold. Any comments, suggestions, or requests to republish or adapt a guide should be submitted using the Research Guides Comments form . Proper credit includes the statement: Written by, or adapted from, Georgetown Law Library (current as of .....).
Last Updated: Feb 29, 2024 1:03 PM
URL: https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/cases

Browse All Articles
Newsletter Sign-Up

26 Mar 2024
Cold Call Podcast

How Do Great Leaders Overcome Adversity?

In the spring of 2021, Raymond Jefferson (MBA 2000) applied for a job in President Joseph Biden’s administration. Ten years earlier, false allegations were used to force him to resign from his prior US government position as assistant secretary of labor for veterans’ employment and training in the Department of Labor. Two employees had accused him of ethical violations in hiring and procurement decisions, including pressuring subordinates into extending contracts to his alleged personal associates. The Deputy Secretary of Labor gave Jefferson four hours to resign or be terminated. Jefferson filed a federal lawsuit against the US government to clear his name, which he pursued for eight years at the expense of his entire life savings. Why, after such a traumatic and debilitating experience, would Jefferson want to pursue a career in government again? Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer Anthony Mayo explores Jefferson’s personal and professional journey from upstate New York to West Point to the Obama administration, how he faced adversity at several junctures in his life, and how resilience and vulnerability shaped his leadership style in the case, "Raymond Jefferson: Trial by Fire."

27 Feb 2024
Research & Ideas

Why Companies Should Share Their DEI Data (Even When It’s Unflattering)

Companies that make their workforce demographics public earn consumer goodwill, even if the numbers show limited progress on diversity, says research by Ryan Buell, Maya Balakrishnan, and Jimin Nam. How can brands make transparency a differentiator?

22 Feb 2024

How to Make AI 'Forget' All the Private Data It Shouldn't Have

When companies use machine learning models, they may run the risk of inadvertently sharing sensitive and private data. Seth Neel explains why it’s important to understand how to wipe AI’s spongelike memory clean.

10 Oct 2023

In Empowering Black Voters, Did a Landmark Law Stir White Angst?

The Voting Rights Act dramatically increased Black participation in US elections—until worried white Americans mobilized in response. Research by Marco Tabellini illustrates the power of a political backlash.

26 Sep 2023

The PGA Tour and LIV Golf Merger: Competition vs. Cooperation

On June 9, 2022, the first LIV Golf event teed off outside of London. The new tour offered players larger prizes, more flexibility, and ambitions to attract new fans to the sport. Immediately following the official start of that tournament, the PGA Tour announced that all 17 PGA Tour players participating in the LIV Golf event were suspended and ineligible to compete in PGA Tour events. Tensions between the two golf entities continued to rise, as more players “defected” to LIV. Eventually LIV Golf filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing the PGA Tour of anticompetitive practices, and the Department of Justice launched an investigation. Then, in a dramatic turn of events, LIV Golf and the PGA Tour announced that they were merging. Harvard Business School assistant professor Alexander MacKay discusses the competitive, antitrust, and regulatory issues at stake and whether or not the PGA Tour took the right actions in response to LIV Golf’s entry in his case, “LIV Golf.”

06 Jun 2023

The Opioid Crisis, CEO Pay, and Shareholder Activism

In 2020, AmerisourceBergen Corporation, a Fortune 50 company in the drug distribution industry, agreed to settle thousands of lawsuits filed nationwide against the company for its opioid distribution practices, which critics alleged had contributed to the opioid crisis in the US. The $6.6 billion global settlement caused a net loss larger than the cumulative net income earned during the tenure of the company’s CEO, which began in 2011. In addition, AmerisourceBergen’s legal and financial troubles were accompanied by shareholder demands aimed at driving corporate governance changes in companies in the opioid supply chain. Determined to hold the company’s leadership accountable, the shareholders launched a campaign in early 2021 to reject the pay packages of executives. Should the board reduce the executives’ pay, as of means of improving accountability? Or does punishing the AmerisourceBergen executives for paying the settlement ignore the larger issue of a business’s responsibility to society? Harvard Business School professor Suraj Srinivasan discusses executive compensation and shareholder activism in the context of the US opioid crisis in his case, “The Opioid Settlement and Controversy Over CEO Pay at AmerisourceBergen.”

17 Jan 2023

Good Companies Commit Crimes, But Great Leaders Can Prevent Them

It's time for leaders to go beyond "check the box" compliance programs. Through corporate cases involving Walmart, Wells Fargo, and others, Eugene Soltes explores the thorny legal issues executives today must navigate in his book Corporate Criminal Investigations and Prosecutions.

29 Nov 2022

How Will Gamers and Investors Respond to Microsoft’s Acquisition of Activision Blizzard?

In January 2022, Microsoft announced its acquisition of the video game company Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. The deal would make Microsoft the world’s third largest video game company, but it also exposes the company to several risks. First, the all-cash deal would require Microsoft to use a large portion of its cash reserves. Second, the acquisition was announced as Activision Blizzard faced gender pay disparity and sexual harassment allegations. That opened Microsoft up to potential reputational damage, employee turnover, and lost sales. Do the potential benefits of the acquisition outweigh the risks for Microsoft and its shareholders? Harvard Business School associate professor Joseph Pacelli discusses the ongoing controversies around the merger and how gamers and investors have responded in the case, “Call of Fiduciary Duty: Microsoft Acquires Activision Blizzard.”

28 Apr 2022

Can You Buy Creativity in the Gig Economy?

It's possible, but creators need more of a stake. A study by Feng Zhu of 10,000 novels in the Chinese e-book market reveals how tying pay to performance can lead to new ideas.

04 Jan 2022
What Do You Think?

Firing McDonald’s Easterbrook: What Could the Board Have Done Differently?

Letting a senior leader go is one of the biggest—and most fraught—decisions for a corporate board. Consider the recent CEO scandal and legal wrangling at McDonald's, says James Heskett. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

20 Sep 2021

How Much Is Freedom Worth? For Gig Workers, a Lot.

In the booming gig economy, does the ability to set your schedule outweigh having sick leave and overtime? Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Laura Katsnelson turn to DoorDash drivers to find out. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

17 Sep 2021

The Trial of Elizabeth Holmes: Visionary, Criminal, or Both?

Eugene Soltes explains why the fraud case against the Theranos cofounder isn't as simple as it seems, and why a conviction probably wouldn't deter unethical behavior from others. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

23 Aug 2021

Why White-Collar Crime Spiked in America After 9/11

The FBI shifted agents and other budget resources toward fighting terrorism in certain parts of the country, and financial fraud and insider trading ran rampant, according to research by Trung Nguyen. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

23 Feb 2021

Examining Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States

The late 20th century saw dramatic growth in incarceration rates in the United States. Of the more than 2.3 million people in US prisons, jails, and detention centers in 2020, 60 percent were Black or Latinx. Harvard Business School assistant professor Reshmaan Hussam probes the assumptions underlying the current prison system, with its huge racial disparities, and considers what could be done to address the crisis of the American criminal justice system in her case, “Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States.” Open for comment; 0 Comments.

19 Oct 2020
Working Paper Summaries

Bankruptcy and the COVID-19 Crisis

Analyzing the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on bankruptcy filing rates in the United States, this study finds that large businesses, small businesses, and consumers experience very different effects of the crisis.

12 Aug 2020

Why Investors Often Lose When They Sue Their Financial Adviser

Forty percent of American investors rely on financial advisers, but the COVID-19 market rollercoaster may have highlighted a weakness when disputes arise. The system favors the financial industry, says Mark Egan. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

26 Jun 2020

Weak Credit Covenants

Prior to the 2020 pandemic, the leveraged loan market experienced an unprecedented boom, which came hand in hand with significant changes in contracting terms. This study presents large-sample evidence of what constitutes contractual weakness from the creditors’ perspective.

23 Mar 2020

Product Disasters Can Be Fertile Ground for Innovation

Rather than chilling innovation, product accidents may provide companies an unexpected opportunity to develop new technologies desired by consumers, according to Hong Luo and Alberto Galasso. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

01 Nov 2019

Should Non-Compete Clauses Be Abolished?

SUMMING UP: Non-compete clauses need to be rewritten, especially when they are applied to lower-income workers, respond James Heskett's readers. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

28 May 2019

Investor Lawsuits Against Auditors Are Falling, and That's Bad News for Capital Markets

It's becoming more difficult for investors to sue corporate auditors. The result? A weakening of trust in US capital markets, says Suraj Srinivasan. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Discussion Forum

Why and How: Using the Case Study Method in the Law Classroom

Post by: Jackie Kim and Lisa Brem

Why should legal educators use case studies and other experiential teaching methods, such as role plays and simulations, in their classes? Hasn’t the Langdell method served legal education well these last 140 years? Certainly creating and using experiential materials requires a different set of skills from faculty, elicits a different response and level of engagement from students, and poses barriers to implementation. The ABA’s LEAPS Project [i] has a comprehensive list of objections to practical problem solving in the classroom: materials are time consuming and expensive to create and deploy; addition of a case study or simulation to a syllabus inherently displaces other material; and there are few incentives from law school leaders to introduce this type of teaching.

Yet, the argument promoting experiential materials and techniques is strong. The 2007 Carnegie Report [ii] recommended integrating lawyering skills practice into the curriculum alongside doctrinal courses, and the ABA added simulation courses to the list of practical experiences that can and should be offered by law schools in its 2015 Guidance Memo [iii] .

In a 2007 Vanderbilt Law Review article [iv] , HLS Dean Martha Minow and Professor Todd D. Rakoff argued that Langdell’s approach to teaching students using appellate cases does not do enough to prepare law students for real-world problems: “The fact is, Langdell’s case method is good for some things, but not good for others. We are not talking about fancy goals here; we are talking about teaching students ‘how to think like a lawyer.’”

But does the case study method result in a higher degree of student learning? While we have not yet seen a study on the efficacy of the case study method vs. the Langdell method in law schools, research [v] from political science professor Matthew Krain suggests that case studies and problem-based activities do enhance certain types of learning over other types of pedagogy. In his investigation, Krain compared the results of pre-and post-course surveys of students who participated in active learning with those who received a traditional lecture course. The case studies and problems that Krain used in his non-traditional classes included: case studies in the form of popular press articles, formal case studies, films, or problem-based case exercises that required students to produce a work product.

Krain found that:

Student-centered reflection, in which students have the opportunity to discuss their understanding of the case, allows both students and instructors to connect active learning experiences back to a larger theoretical context. Case learning is particularly useful for dramatizing abstract theoretical concepts, making seemingly distant events or issues seem more “authentic” or “real,” demonstrating the connection between theory and practice, and building critical-thinking and problem-solving skills (Inoue & Krain, 2014; Krain, 2010; Kuzma & Haney, 2001; Lamy, 2007; Swimelar, 2013).

This study suggests that case-based approaches have great utility in the classroom, and they should be used more often in instances where students’ understanding of conceptual complexity or knowledge of case details is critical. Moreover, case-based exercises can be derived from a variety of different types of materials and still have great utility. If deployed selectively in the context of a more traditional classroom setting as ways to achieve particular educational objectives, case-based approaches can be useful tools in our pedagogical toolbox.

For those who might be ready to try a case study, role play, or simulation, there are resources that can help. Harvard Law School produces case studies for use throughout the legal curriculum. The HLS Case Studies program publishes these teaching materials, and makes them available to educators, academic staff, students, and trainers. Outside of Harvard Law School, links to resources for educators implementing the case study method can be found on the Case Studies Program Resources page. Listed are case study affiliates at Harvard, legal teaching and learning tools, tips for case teaching, and free case materials. Examples include the Legal Education, ADR, and Practical Problem Solving (LEAPS) Project [vi] from the American Bar Association , which provides resources for various topics on legal education, and the Teaching Post , an educators’ forum offered by the Harvard Business School where professors can seek or provide advice on case study teaching.

“… [O]ur society is full of new problems demanding new solutions, and less so than in the past are lawyers inventing those solutions. We think we can, and ought to, do better.” – Dean Martha Minow & Professor Todd Rakoff. [vii]

[i] “Overcoming Barriers to Teaching ‘Practical Problem-Solving’.” Legal Education, ADR & Practical Problem-Solving (LEAPS) Project, American Bar Association, Section of Dispute Resolution. Accessed March 16, 2017, http://leaps.uoregon.edu/content/overcoming-barriers-teaching-%E2%80%9Cpractical-problem-solving%E2%80%9D. [ii] William M. Sullivan, Anne Colby, Judith Welch Wegner, Lloyd Bond, and Lee S. Shulman, “Educating Lawyers,” The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (2007). [iii] American Bar Association, “Managing Director’s Guidance Memo,” Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar (2015). [iv] Martha Minow and Todd D. Rakoff, “A Case for Another Case Method,” Vanderbilt Law Review 60(2) (2007): 597-607. [v] Matthew Krain, “Putting the learning in case learning? The effects of case-based approaches on student knowledge, attitudes, and engagement,” Journal on Excellence in College Teaching 27(2) (2016): 131-153. [vi] “Overcoming Barriers to Teaching ‘Practical Problem-Solving’.” [vii] Minow and Rakoff.

About Lisa Brem

Search for:

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive weekly notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address

Follow HLS Case Studies

Subscribe to our newsletter

Subscribe to our RSS feed

Et Seq., The Harvard Law School Library Blog
Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program
HLS Berkman Center for Internet and Society
HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation
HLS Program on the Legal Profession
Program on Negotiation

Legal Research

Statutory Law
Regulations
Secondary sources
Citing Legal Resources

Case Law Resources

Caselaw Access Project The Caselaw Access Project (CAP), maintained by the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, includes "all official, book-published United States case law — every volume designated as an official report of decisions by a court within the United States...[including] all state courts, federal courts, and territorial courts for American Samoa, Dakota Territory, Guam, Native American Courts, Navajo Nation, and the Northern Mariana Islands." As of the publication of this guide, CAP "currently included all volumes published through 2020 with new data releases on a rolling basis at the beginning of each year."
CourtListener Court Listener is a free and publicly accessible online platform that provides a collection of legal resources and court documents, including court opinions and case law from various jurisdictions in the United States. It includes PACER data (the RECAP Archive), opinions, or oral argument recordings.
FindLaw Caselaw Summaries Archive FindLaw provides a database of case law from the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal, as well as several state supreme courts. It includes U.S. Supreme Court Opinions, U.S. Federal Appellate Court Opinions and U.S. State Supreme, Appellate and Trial Court Opinions. Search for case summaries or by jurisdiction.
FindLaw Jurisdiction Search FindLaw provides a database of case law from the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal, as well as several state supreme courts. It includes U.S. Supreme Court Opinions, U.S. Federal Appellate Court Opinions and U.S. State Supreme, Appellate and Trial Court Opinions. Search for case summaries or by jurisdiction.
Google Scholar for Case Law Google Scholar offers an extensive database of state and federal cases, including U.S. Supreme Court Opinions, U.S. Federal District, Appellate, Tax, and Bankruptcy Court Opinions, U.S. State Appellate and Supreme Court Opinions, Scholarly articles, papers, and reports. To get started, select the “case law” radio button, and choose your search terms.
Justia Justia offers cases from the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal, and U.S. District Courts. Additionally, you may find links to many state supreme court and intermediate courts of appeal cases. Content includes U.S. Supreme Court Opinions, U.S. Federal Appellate & District Court Opinions, Selected U.S. Federal Appellate & District Court dockets and orders and U.S. State Supreme & Appellate Court Opinions.

An interdisciplinary, international, full-text database of over 18,000 sources including newspapers, journals, wire services, newsletters, company reports and SEC filings, case law, government documents, transcripts of broadcasts, and selected reference works.

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) PACER is a nationwide database for accessing federal court documents, including case dockets. It covers U.S. District Courts, Bankruptcy Courts, and the U.S. Court of Appeals. Users can search for and access federal case dockets and documents for a fee.
Ravel Law Public Case Access "This new Public Case Access site was created as a result of a collaboration between the Harvard Law School Library and Ravel Law. The company supported the library in its work to digitize 40,000 printed volumes of cases, comprised of over forty million pages of court decisions, including original materials from cases that predate the U.S. Constitution."
The RECAP Archive Part of CourtListener, RECAP provides access to millions of PACER documents and dockets.

State Courts

State Court Websites This page provides a list of various state court system websites by state.
Pennsylvania Judiciary Web Portal The Pennsylvania Judiciary Web Portal provides the public with access to various aspects of court information, including appellate courts, common pleas courts and magisterial district court docket sheets; common pleas courts and magisterial district court calendars; and PAePay.
Supreme Court of Pennsylvania Opinions

US Supreme Court

US Reports he opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States are published officially in the United States Reports.
US Reports through HeinOnline
<< Previous: Start
Next: Statutory Law >>
Last Updated: Apr 5, 2024 3:44 PM
URL: https://guides.library.cmu.edu/legal_research

International edition
Australia edition
Europe edition

The essential cases every law student should know

Cases capture human stories, shape public debate and establish new expectations of the state. Their wider effect can reflect society's consciousness but often lead to new laws. Cases and judges' decisions are a law student's bread and butter. Here are a few you will come across:

Care for thy neighbour:

In 1932 Mrs Donoghue launched the modern law of negligence, after finding her ginger beer less than appealing. Known to generations of law students as the "snail in the bottle" case, it is best known for Lord Atkin's famous neighbour principle. In declaring we should take reasonable care to avoid harm to those we foresee can be affected, he established when we owe duties to each other. Accidents and injuries were forever to be reshaped into claims and compensation.

Foreign detainees

Known as the Belmarsh decision , there is no modern case that better sets the boundary between national security and civil liberties. Decided by a panel of nine law lords, the 2004 decision became an important milestone in judges protecting both the rule of law and human rights. In a challenge to the Labour policy of indefinitely detaining foreign terrorist suspects without charge, the majority declared the British state acted illegally and in a discriminatory way. In his powerful rejection, Lord Hoffman stated "The real threat to the life of the nation… comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these."

Spanish fisherman

Providing the legal backdrop to a decade of EU-scepticism is the 1991 case of Factortame , this case on the rights of Spanish fisherman to fish in British waters is a mainstay on any public law course. It confirmed the priority of European laws over UK acts of parliament and thus struck a blow against parliament's legal supremacy. In so doing it provoked much constitutional debate about the extent of EU legal powers - and Britain's relationship with Europe as a whole.

Officially the longest case in English legal history, this ten year David v Goliath libel battle exposed the price of justice when corporations take on individuals. The fast food giant sued green campaigners David Morris and Helen Steel for libel over a stinging pamphlet criticising the their ethical credentials. McDonalds walked away with both a win and a PR disaster. The European court of human rights later declared in 2005 that the pair, who were unfunded and were representing themselves, had been denied their right to a fair trial.

Jodie and Mary

In the year 2000 the plight of conjoined twins made front page news . The question was whether it was justified to separate and knowingly "kill" the weaker Mary in order to save her stronger sister Jodie, given both were destined for a premature death. In spite of parents favouring non-separation, doctors wanted a declaration that such an operation would be lawful. In a maze of ethical and legal conflicts, Lord Justice Ward rather hollowly declared that "this is a court of law, not a court of morals."

After admitting to sleepless nights, the judges allowed the doctors to separate. Lord Justice Brooke declared the situation as one of necessity, allowing the option of a lesser evil. The stronger twin survived and made a full recovery. The thankfully rare case, otherwise found in philosophy debates, demonstrates the relationship between law and morality, perhaps one of the first questions on a legal theory course.

Domestic abuse

A year after marital rape was declared rape in 1991, came the case of Kiranjit Ahluwalia , who had been abused for over a decade by a violent husband. She was convicted of murder after setting her husband alight as he slept. In recognising long-term domestic abuse and the possibility of a slow-burn anger that led to her snapping, the case was a cause célèbre for feminist and domestic abuse groups. Though finally the decision in the end was based on diminished responsibility, it was seen as a benchmark for tackling the gender bias in the criminal law and raising public awareness of domestic abuse. Ahluwalia's conviction was reduced to manslaughter, and she was freed.

International human rights law received a global TV audience in 1998 after former Chilean dictator General Pinochet was arrested in London. Under the rules of universal jurisdiction, he was detained following a Spanish extradition request facing charges of crimes against humanity. The law lords declared that there could be a limit to the immunity enjoyed by heads of states. Though Pinochet was never extradited, the case sent out a strong message about accountability for leaders who commit human rights abuses,before the international criminal court was established.

The case is also well known among lawyers when after the first hearing it was disclosed that that one of the ruling law lords, Lord Hoffmann, was a director of Amnesty International, a party to the cases. The entire hearing had to be repeated to show that "justice must not only be done but be seen to be done."

The internet age

Injunctions, twitter, privacy and the extra marital activities of footballers were all the rage in early 2011. Nothing struck up more attention than the application for an injunction by Ryan Giggs against the Sun. His name was widely tweeted and the situation became more farcical when MP John Hemming revealed his name in the House of Commons. The debate forced the law to react to an age of the internet and social media. The case followed a long line of celebrity court battles in the 2000's, and became another marker in the debate between balancing freedom of expression and the right to a private life.

From across the Atlantic arguably no case better demonstrates the political and social impact of judicial decisions. The landmark decision in 1973 upheld a woman's right to an abortion. Synonymous with abortion in the USA. Hundreds of thousands march on the US supreme court on the anniversary of the decision each year.

Any of Denning's cases

In our common law system, many judges leave their mark on a particular area of law. However clichéd, no judge will live longer in the memory of law students than the controversial Lord Denning. He demonstrates the power of personality in a subject that is often seen technical, dry and rule-based. In the words of Lord Irvine, "the word Denning became a byword for the law itself." Denning reminds us that all cases are eventually decided by individuals who are made up of values and personal perspectives that make them who they are. Students , you are encouraged to think, debate and learn the law in the same spirit. Good luck.

Are there any need-to-know cases missing from this list? Add them in the comments below.

Studying law
UK criminal justice
International criminal justice
Universal jurisdiction
Injunctions

Comments (…)

Artificial Intelligence and the Law

Legal scholars on the potential for innovation and upheaval.

December 5, 2023
Tomas Weber
Illustrations by Joan Wong | Photography by Timothy Archibald
Fall 2023 – Issue 109
Cover Story
Share on Twitter
Share on Facebook
Share by Email

Earlier this year, in Belgium, a young father of two ended his life after a conversation with an AI-powered chatbot. He had, apparently, been talking to the large language model regularly and had become emotionally dependent on it. When the system encouraged him to commit suicide, he did. “Without these conversations with the chatbot,” his widow told a Brussels newspaper, “my husband would still be here.”

A devastating tragedy, but one that experts predict could become a lot more common.

As the use of generative AI expands, so does the capacity of large language models to cause serious harm. Mark Lemley (BA ’88), the William H. Neukom Professor of Law, worries about a future in which AI provides advice on committing acts of terrorism, recipes for poisons or explosives, or disinformation that can ruin reputations or incite violence.

The question is who, if anybody, will be held accountable for these harms?

“We don’t have case law yet,” Lemley says. “The company that runs the AI is not doing anything deliberate. They don’t necessarily know what the AI is going to say in response to any given prompt.” So, who’s liable? “The correct answer, right now, might be nobody. And that’s something we will probably want to change.”

Generative AI is developing at a stunning speed, creating new and thorny problems in well-established legal areas, disrupting long-standing regimes of civil liability—and outpacing the necessary frameworks, both legal and regulatory, that can ensure the risks are anticipated and accounted for.

To keep up with the flood of new, large language models like ChatGPT, judges and lawmakers will need to grapple, for the first time, with a host of complex questions. For starters, how should the law govern harmful speech that is not created by human beings with rights under the First Amendment? How must criminal statutes and prosecutions change to address the role of bots in the commission of crimes? As growing numbers of people seek legal advice from chatbots, what does that mean for the regulation of legal services? With large language models capable of authoring novels and AI video generators churning out movies, how can existing copyright law be made current?

Hanging over this urgent list of questions is yet another: Are politicians, administrators, judges, and lawyers ready for the upheaval AI has triggered?

ARTIFICIAL AGENTS, CRIMINAL INTENT

Did ChatGPT defame Professor Lemley?

In 2023, when Lemley asked the chatbot GPT-4 to provide information about himself, it said he had been accused of a crime: namely, the misappropriation of trade secrets. Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology , Lemley had done no such thing. His area of research, it seems, had caused the chatbot to hallucinate criminal offenses.

More recently, while researching a paper on AI and liability, Lemley and his team asked Google for information on how to prevent seizures. The search engine responded with a link titled “Had a seizure, now what?” and Lemley clicked. Among the answers: “put something in someone’s mouth” and “hold the person down.” Something was very wrong. Google’s algorithm, it turned out, had sourced content from a webpage explaining precisely what not to do. The error could have caused serious injury. (This advice is no longer included in search results.)

Lemley says it is not clear AI companies will be held liable for errors like these. The law, he says, needs to evolve to plug the gaps. But Lemley is also concerned about an even broader problem: how to deal with AI models that cause harm but that have impenetrable technical details locked inside a black box.

Take defamation. Establishing liability, Lemley explains, requires a plaintiff to prove mens rea: an intent to deceive. When the author of an allegedly defamatory statement is a chatbot, though, the question of intent becomes murky and will likely turn on the model’s technical details: how exactly it was trained and optimized.

To guard against possible exposure, Lemley fears, developers will make their models less transparent. Turning an AI into a black box, after all, makes it harder for plaintiffs to argue that it had the requisite “intent.” At the same time, it makes models more difficult to regulate.

How, then, should we change the law? What’s needed, says Lemley, is a legal framework that incentivizes developers to focus less on avoiding liability and more on encouraging companies to create systems that reflect our preferences. We’d like systems to be open and comprehensible, he says. We’d prefer AIs that do not lie and do not cause harm. But that doesn’t mean they should only say nice things about people simply to avoid liability. We expect them to be genuinely informative.

In light of these competing interests, judges and policymakers should take a fine-grained approach to AI cases, asking what, exactly, we should be seeking to incentivize. As a starting point, suggests Lemley, we should dump the mens rea requirement in AI defamation cases now that we’ve entered an era when dangerous content can so easily be generated by machines that lack intent.

Lemley’s point extends to AI speech that contributes to criminal conduct. Imagine, he says, a chatbot generating a list of instructions for becoming a hit man or making a deadly toxin. There is precedent for finding human beings liable for these things. But when it comes to AI, once again accountability is made difficult by the machine’s lack of intent.

“We want AI to avoid persuading people to hurt themselves, facilitating crimes, and telling falsehoods about people,” Lemley writes in “Where’s the Liability in Harmful AI Speech?” So instead of liability resting on intent, which AIs lack, Lemley suggests an AI company should be held liable for harms in cases where it was designed without taking standard actions to mitigate risk.

“It is deploying AI to help prosecutors make decisions that are not conditioned on race. Because that’s what the law requires.”

Julian Nyarko, associate professor of law, on the algorithm he developed

At the same time, Lemley worries that holding AI companies liable when ordinary humans wouldn’t be, may inappropriately discourage development of the technology. He and his co-authors argue that we need a set of best practices for safe AI. Companies that follow the best practices would be immune from suit for harms that result from their technology while companies that ignore best practices would be held responsible when their AIs are found to have contributed to a resulting harm.

HELPING TO CLOSE THE ACCESS TO JUSTICE GAP

As AI threatens to disrupt criminal law, lawyers themselves are facing major disruptions. The technology has empowered individuals who cannot find or pay an attorney to turn to AI-powered legal help. In a civil justice system awash in unmet legal need, that could be a game changer.

“It’s hard to believe,” says David Freeman Engstrom , JD ’02, Stanford’s LSVF Professor in Law and co-director of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession , “but the majority of civil cases in the American legal system—that’s millions of cases each year—are debt collections, evictions, or family law matters.” Most pit a represented institutional plaintiff (a bank, landlord, or government agency) against an unrepresented individual. AI-powered legal help could profoundly shift the legal services marketplace while opening courthouse doors wider for all.

“Up until now,” says Engstrom, “my view was that AI wasn’t powerful enough to move the dial on access to justice.” That view was front and center in a book Engstrom published earlier this year, Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice . Then ChatGPT roared onto the scene—a “lightning-bolt moment,” as he puts it. The technology has advanced so fast that Engstrom now sees rich potential for large language models to translate back and forth between plain language and legalese, parsing an individual’s description of a problem and responding with clear legal options and actions.

“We need to make more room for new tools to serve people who currently don’t have lawyers,” says Engstrom, whose Rhode Center has worked with multiple state supreme courts on how to responsibly relax their unauthorized practice of law and related rules. As part of that work, a groundbreaking Rhode Center study offered the first rigorous evidence on legal innovation in Utah and Arizona, the first two states to implement significant reforms.

But there are signs of trouble on the horizon. This summer, a New York judge sanctioned an attorney for filing a motion that cited phantom precedents. The lawyer, it turns out, relied on ChatGPT for legal research, never imagining the chatbot might hallucinate fake law.

How worried should we be about AI-powered legal tech leading lay people—or even attorneys—astray? Margaret Hagan , JD ’13, lecturer in law, is trying to walk a fine line between techno-optimism and pessimism.

“I can see the point of view of both camps,” says Hagan, who is also the executive director of the Legal Design Lab , which is researching how AI can increase access to justice, as well as designing and evaluating new tools. “The lab tries to steer between those two viewpoints and not be guided by either optimistic anecdotes or scary stories.”

To that end, Hagan is studying how individuals are using AI tools to solve legal problems. Beginning in June, she gave volunteers fictional legal scenarios, such as receiving an eviction notice, and watched as they consulted Google Bard. “People were asking, ‘Do I have any rights if my landlord sends me a notice?’ and ‘Can I really be evicted if I pay my rent on time?’” says Hagan.

Bard “provided them with very clear and seemingly authoritative information,” she says, including correct statutes and ordinances. It also offered up imaginary case law and phone numbers of nonexistent legal aid groups.

In her policy lab class, AI for Legal Help , which began last autumn, Hagan’s students are continuing that work by interviewing members of the public about how they might use AI to help them with legal problems. As a future lawyer, Jessica Shin, JD ’25, a participant in Hagan’s class, is concerned about vulnerable people placing too much faith in these tools.

“I’m worried that if a chatbot isn’t dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, key things can and will be missed—like statute of limitation deadlines or other procedural steps that will make or break their cases,” she says.

“Government cannot govern AI, if government doesn’t understand AI.”

Daniel Ho, William Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law

Given all this promise and peril, courts need guidance, and SLS is providing it. Engstrom was just tapped by the American Law Institute to lead a multiyear project to advise courts on “high-volume” dockets, including debt, eviction, and family cases. Technology will be a pivotal part, as will examining how courts can leverage AI. Two years ago, Engstrom and Hagan teamed up with Mark Chandler, JD ’81, former Cisco chief legal officer now at the Rhode Center, to launch the Filing Fairness Project . They’ve partnered with courts in seven states, from Alaska to Texas, to make it easier for tech providers to serve litigants using AI-based tools. Their latest collaboration will work with the Los Angeles Superior Court, the nation’s largest, to design new digital pathways that better serve court users.

CAN MACHINES PROMOTE COMPLIANCE WITH THE LAW?

The hope that AI can be harnessed to help foster fairness and efficiency extends to the work of government too. Take criminal justice. It’s supposed to be blind, but the system all too often can be discriminatory—especially when it comes to race. When deciding whether to charge or dismiss a case, a prosecutor is prohibited by the Constitution from taking a suspect’s race into account. There is real concern, though, that these decisions might be shaped by racial bias—whether implicit or explicit.

Enter AI. Julian Nyarko , associate professor of law, has developed an algorithm to mask race-related information from felony reports. He then implemented the algorithm in a district attorney’s office, erasing racially identifying details before the reports reached the prosecutor’s desk. Nyarko believes his algorithm will help ensure lawful prosecutorial decisions.

“The work uses AI tools to increase compliance with the law,” he says. “It is deploying AI to help prosecutors make decisions that are not conditioned on race. Because that’s what the law requires.”

GOVERNING AI

While the legal profession evaluates how it might integrate this new technology, the government has been catching up on how to grapple with the AI revolution. According to Daniel Ho , the William Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, one of the core challenges for the public sector is a dearth of expertise.

Very few specialists in AI choose to work in the public sector. According to a recent survey, less than 1 percent of recent AI PhD graduates took positions in government—compared with some 60 percent who chose industry jobs. A lack of the right people, and an ailing government digital infrastructure, means the public sector is missing the expertise to craft law and policy and effectively use these tools to improve governance. “Government cannot govern AI,” says Ho, “if government doesn’t understand AI.”

Ho, who also advises the White House as an appointed member of the National AI Advisory Committee (NAIAC), is concerned policymakers and administrators lack sufficient knowledge to separate speculative from concrete risks posed by the technology.

Evelyn Douek , a Stanford Law assistant professor, agrees. There is a lack of available information about how commonly used AI tools work—information the government could use to guide its regulatory approach, she says. The outcome? An epidemic of what Douek calls “magical thinking” on the part of the public sector about what is possible.

The information gap between the public and private sectors motivated a large research team from Stanford Law School’s Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab) to assess the feasibility of recent proposals for AI regulation. The team, which included Tino Cuéllar (MA ’96, PhD ’00), former SLS professor and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Colleen Honigsberg , professor of law; and Ho, concluded that one important step is for the government to collect and investigate events in which AI systems seriously malfunction or cause harm, such as with bioweapons risk.

“If you look at other complex products, like cars and pharmaceuticals, the government has a database of information that details the factors that led to accidents and harms,” says Neel Guha, JD/PhD ’24 (BA ’18), a PhD student in computer science and co-author of a forthcoming paper that explores this topic. The NAIAC formally adopted this recommendation for such a reporting system in November.

“Our full understanding of how these systems are being used and where they might fail is still in flux,” says Guha. “An adverse-event-reporting system is a necessary prerequisite for more effective governance.”

MODERNIZING GOVERNMENT

While the latest AI models demand new regulatory tools and frameworks, they also require that we rethink existing ones—a challenge when the various stakeholders often operate in separate silos.

“Policymakers might propose something that is technically impossible. Engineers might propose a technical solution that is flatly illegal.” Ho says. “What you need are people with an understanding of both dimensions.”

Last year, Ho, Christie Lawrence, JD ’24, and Isaac Cui, JD ’25, documented extensive challenges the federal government faced in implementing AI legal requirements in an article. This led Ho to testify before the U.S. Senate on a range of reforms. And this work is driving change. The landmark White House executive order on AI adopted these recommendations, and the proposed AI Leadership to Enable Accountable Deployment (AI LEAD) Act would further codify recommendations, such as the creation of a chief AI officer, agency AI governance boards, and agency strategic planning. These requirements would help ensure the government is able to properly use and govern the technology.

“If generative AI technologies continue on their present trajectory, it seems likely that they will upend many of our assumptions about a copyright system.”

Paul Goldstein, Stella W. and Ira S. Lillick Professor of Law

Ho, as faculty director of RegLab, is also building bridges with local and federal agencies to develop high-impact demonstration projects of machine learning and data science in the public sector.

The RegLab is working with the Internal Revenue Service to modernize the tax-collection system with AI. It is collaborating with the Environmental Protection Agency to develop machine-learning technology to improve environmental compliance. And during the pandemic, it partnered with Santa Clara County to improve the public health department’s wide range of pandemic response programs.

“AI has real potential to transform parts of the public sector,” says Ho. “Our demonstration projects with government agencies help to envision an affirmative view of responsible technology to serve Americans.”

In a sign of an encouraging shift, Ho has observed an increasing number of computer scientists gravitating toward public policy, eager to participate in shaping laws and policy to respond to rapidly advancing AI, as well as law students with deep interests in technology. Alumni of the RegLab have been snapped up to serve in the IRS and the U.S. Digital Service, the technical arm of the executive branch. Ho himself serves as senior advisor on responsible AI to the U.S. Department of Labor. And the law school and the RegLab are front and center in training a new generation of lawyers and technologists to shape this future.

AI GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

Swaths of books and movies have been made about humans threatened by artificial intelligence, but what happens when the technology becomes a menace to the entertainment industry itself? It’s still early days for generative AI-created novels, films, and other content, but it’s beginning to look like Hollywood has been cast in its own science fiction tale—and the law has a role to play.

“If generative AI technologies continue on their present trajectory,” says the Stella W. and Ira S. Lillick Professor of Law Paul Goldstein , “it seems likely that they will upend many of our assumptions about a copyright system.”

There are two main assumptions behind intellectual property law that AI is on track to disrupt. From feature films and video games with multimillion-dollar budgets to a book whose author took five years to complete, the presumption has been that copyright law is necessary to incentivize costly investments. Now AI has upended that logic.

“When a video game that today requires a $100 million investment can be produced by generative AI at a cost that is one or two orders of magnitude lower,” says Goldstein, “the argument for copyright as an incentive to investment will weaken significantly across popular culture.”

The second assumption, resting on the consumer side of the equation, is no more stable. Copyright, a system designed in part to protect the creators of original works, has also long been justified as maximizing consumer choice. However, in an era of AI-powered recommendation engines, individual choice becomes less and less important, and the argument will only weaken as streaming services “get a lot better at figuring out what suits your tastes and making decisions for you,” says Goldstein.

If these bedrock assumptions behind copyright are both going to be rendered “increasingly irrelevant” by AI, what then is the necessary response? Goldstein says we need to find legal frameworks that will better safeguard human authors.

“I believe that authorship and autonomy are independent values that deserve to be protected,” he says. Goldstein foresees a framework in which AI-produced works are clearly labeled as such to guarantee consumers have accurate information.

The labeling approach may have the advantage of simplicity, but on its own it is not enough. At a moment of unprecedented disruption, Goldstein argues, lawmakers should be looking for additional ways to support human creators who will find themselves competing with AIs that can generate works faster and for a fraction of the cost. The solution, he suggests, might involve looking to practices in countries that have traditionally given greater thought to supporting artists, such as those in Europe.

“There will always be an appetite for authenticity, a taste for the real thing,” Goldstein says. “How else do you explain why someone will pay $2,000 to watch Taylor Swift from a distant balcony, when they could stream the same songs in their living room for pennies?” In the case of intellectual property law, catching up with the technology may mean heeding our human impulse—and taking the necessary steps to facilitate the deeply rooted urge to make and share authentic works of art. SL

Search Menu
Advance articles
EJIL: Talk!
The Podcast!
EJIL: Live!
Author Guidelines
Submission Site
Open Access
Why Publish?
About European Journal of International Law
Editorial Board
Advertising and Corporate Services
Journals Career Network
Self-Archiving Policy
Dispatch Dates
Journals on Oxford Academic
Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

1 introduction, 2 research methods, 3 literature review: textbooks and discipline making, 4 reading the lines: the basic architecture of international law textbooks, 5 reading between the lines: the international legal projects of textbooks, 6 reading against the lines: what do textbooks write out of international law, 7 conclusions.

< Previous

Textbooks as Markers and Makers of International Law: A Brazilian Case Study

Article contents
Figures & tables
Supplementary Data

Luíza Leão Soares Pereira, Fabio Costa Morosini, Textbooks as Markers and Makers of International Law: A Brazilian Case Study, European Journal of International Law , Volume 35, Issue 1, February 2024, Pages 25–62, https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chae007

Permissions Icon Permissions

This article challenges conventional views of international law textbooks as mere instructional tools and explores them as powerful sites for shaping knowledge and the discipline. Drawing on empirical methods and critical theory, we analyse the 10 main international law textbooks used in Brazil and conduct interviews with their authors to illuminate the textbooks’ complexities and their potential for shaping the discipline and the profession. The article delves into the tension between the structure of international law as depicted in the textbooks and the agency of their authors, investigating the authors’ identities and backgrounds. Brazil serves as a compelling case study due to its numerous international law textbooks and their widespread use. Our results indicate a predominant universalist approach in Brazilian textbooks and their connection to the French international law tradition. Moreover, the study sheds light on the Brazilian ‘invisible college’ of international lawyers, revealing gender and racial disparities and institutional centralities. It also uncovers crucial omissions in the textbooks, such as the relationship of international law to colonialism, slavery, race, gender and economic inequality. Overall, this study offers a comprehensive understanding of international law as a field in Brazil and provides a valuable methodological framework for future research on textbooks’ role in shaping the discipline.

Textbooks are sites for power and discipline making, ‘engines of sociomental control that delimit the realm of the “relevant” in international law’. 1 Yet they receive limited attention as scholarship. Cast as training tools that, by virtue of their genre, do not encapsulate original insights, we tend to miss how their comprehensiveness in fact paints a broad and nuanced picture of international law and its place in world making for the book’s readership. This article aims at reading textbooks as ambitious agenda setters in their own right.

We employ empirical methods, harvesting data from the textbooks themselves and conducting semi-structured interviews with their authors, but infuse our analysis with a critical sensibility, grounded on literature on the sociology of law, 2 on knowledge production in international law, 3 on international law textbooks, 4 on semi-peripheral international lawyers, 5 on the teaching of Third World Approaches to International Law, 6 on critical and decolonial approaches to teaching international law, 7 on comparative international law 8 and on the decolonization of higher education. 9 Each of these bodies of literature comes together to help us revisit textbooks and their function beyond training materials, unveiling their analytical, political and social possibilities. Guided by this critical literature, we evaluate textbooks not only as repositories of data on how international law is taught but also as maps of the sensibilities produced and reproduced by authors and practitioners of international law.

Based on this theoretical framework, we seek to explore the tension between the structure of international law that these textbooks describe and the agency of their authors and recipients. 10 Thus, we reject the idea that authors can produce a ‘neutral’ manual or discover international law outside of the tension between structure and agency. 11 Part of uncovering this goes towards asking who is behind these texts and their respective ideologies and identities, which is part of what we do here, analysing the curricula of textbook authors and conducting interviews with them to clarify their views of international law to better understand the ways in which these imprint on the texts they produce. We seek to tackle structural questions about international law (such as whether there are substantive themes of ‘national’ interest that are repeated in the textbooks, whether there are privileged sources among their citations and what are the patterns of nationality and gender among the authors of secondary works cited) and questions about the agency of the authors of these textbooks (how do the textbooks reflect the authors’ professional histories, geographic location, academic background and positionality?).

We use Brazil as our field of analysis because, first, this is where we practise and teach international law. In addition, Brazil has an unusually large number of textbooks in the discipline that supply a rich source for analysis. This is a product of a combination of factors that include a disproportionate number of law schools per capita, 12 a long-standing tradition of teaching law using primarily textbooks 13 and an incentive to produce one’s own textbook to demonstrate prestige in the local academy. Brazilian students also often do not speak English or French as a second language, and, thus, primary materials are de facto inaccessible to them in their original form. International law textbooks, in this sense, act as literal translations of these materials, interspersed with the ideas of the authors. Finally, we propose that there is no reason why the Brazilian experience should be seen as more niche than, for instance, an analysis of textbooks from the five permanent members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council: our methodology and substantive insights are useful and easily transplantable across jurisdictions.

We propose that our focus on Brazil should not distract readers from our project’s application beyond any particular jurisdiction. Our insights, while shedding light on some aspects particular to the Brazilian experience, are a case study on the power of textbooks as markers and makers of international law. The template we sketch out here is an invitation for further research into textbooks in other locations. The following sections provide different modes of reading textbooks. The fourth section reads the lines of textbooks, examining their basic architecture and summarizing the results of our findings, 14 while the fifth section reads between the lines of textbooks by exploring the legal projects that underpin them. We conclude with the sixth section by reading against the lines and studying what is absent from Brazilian textbooks.

Overall, the focus on Brazil shows that Brazilian textbooks adopt a universalist approach and a connection to a French international law tradition. We also observe that, while some textbooks present distinctively authorial characteristics (project textbooks), others are more descriptive and technical (instrument textbooks), which we connect not only to the global trend of managerialism 15 but also to developments in the Brazilian legal landscape. In addition, we use textbooks to sketch out some characteristics of the Brazilian ‘invisible college’, 16 such as its lack of gender and racial diversity, similarities between authors’ career paths, the centrality of certain Brazilian and international institutions in Brazilian international lawyers’ legal imaginaries and the importance of key individuals in the Brazilian international legal profession. Finally, we read against the lines of these textbooks to reveal neglected areas that are particularly important in the Brazilian context – international law’s relationship to colonialism and slavery, its connection to racial and gender discrimination and economic inequality and developments in transitional justice. The results provide not only a unique window into the content of Brazilian textbooks themselves but also a complex, historically and socially situated picture of international law as a field in Brazil and a methodological framework for others seeking to use textbooks to understand the discipline anywhere.

We analyse the 10 main Brazilian textbooks currently in use: Curso de Direito Internacional Público by Alberto do Amaral Júnior; 17 Curso de Direito Internacional Público by Carlos Roberto Husek; 18 Direito Internacional by Dominique Carreau and Jahyr-Philippe Bichara; 19 Direito Internacional Público by Francisco Rezek; 20 Manual de Direito Internacional Público by Hildebrando Accioly, Geraldo Eulálio do Nascimento e Silva and Paulo Borba Casella; 21 Direito Internacional Público by Marcelo Dias Varella; 22 Direito Internacional Público by Salem Nasser; 23 Curso de Direito Internacional Público by Sidney Guerra; 24 and Curso de Direito Internacional Público by Valerio de Oliveira Mazzuoli. 25 We also chose to analyse the Curso de Direito Internacional , by Celso Duvivier de Albuquerque Mello, 26 despite the absence of new editions since 2005 due to his passing, as it is still used widely in Brazilian classrooms. There are other textbooks in circulation in Brazil, but we selected these as the best representatives of the field, based on our lived experiences as students and teachers of international law in Brazil and their widespread adoption in the Brazilian law school curriculum. 27

All textbooks analysed were written from the 2000s onwards, with two exceptions. The first, mentioned above, is the still central Celso de Mello’s Curso de Direito Internacional . The second is Accioly and colleague’s textbook, based on his 1935 three-volume treatise, 28 a celebrated and extensive work translated into both French and Spanish. 29 The abridged textbook version was first published in 1948. Since Accioly’s passing in 1962, similarly to what we see in the tradition of English language classics such as those by Lassa Oppenheim, the textbook has lived ‘other lives’ under new editorship and authorship – Ambassador Geraldo Eulálio do Nascimento e Silva became its editor from 1970 and its author since 1996 and Professor Paulo Borba Casella has been listed as an author from 2008. 30 The textbook is currently in its impressive 26th edition. 31 We recognize the merit of looking at these works through a historical lens 32 and will indeed attribute some of their idiosyncrasies to their temporal dislocation. However, we chose to engage with them in the same context as the other eight textbooks in analysis – they are still relevant to paint a picture of international law in Brazil today. We identified two women-authored textbooks: Gilda Russomano’s Direito Internacional Público 33 and Deisy Ventura’s Direito Internacional Público (co-authored with Ricardo Seitenfus). 34 We decided not to include these works in our analysis because neither book has been updated and reissued, 35 and, unlike Celso de Mello’s textbook, they do not continue to be used widely in law schools.

We undertook this research, under the auspices of a research group, as a collective effort with multiple research assistants, coordinated by us as co-authors. We divided the work into two phases. In the first phase, researchers analysed the textbooks themselves as well as the authors’ biographies. 36 We asked researchers to compile data under the following categories: (i) biographies of authors, documenting institutions where they obtained their degrees, where they teach law (for those who were/are law professors) and their practice outside academia; (ii) international law topics addressed in each textbook; and (iii) references used in each textbook – for example, treaties, cases and bibliography. In parallel, we conducted weekly literature review sessions on relevant subjects. We compiled this data in one general report. The preliminary results were published in a series of blog posts. 37

By the end of this first stage of the research, there were several questions that could not be answered by analysing the raw data that we had obtained. They included questions about the importance of editors and publishers in dictating the content of the books in question, who the authors envisaged as their main audience, reflections about whose works they chose to cite and why and more open questions about professional networks and mentorships that would help us better understand the characteristics of a Brazilian ‘invisible college’. We decided to interview all of the living authors to help us answer these questions. We developed a semi-structured questionnaire around four major themes: biography; sources of international law and bibliography used to produce the textbook; sex, gender and racial self-identification; and the authors’ relationship with their publishers. 38 All authors were extremely generous with their time and accepted our invitation to be interviewed. They received the questionnaire in advance and gave us lengthy and illuminating, as well as entertaining, interviews. All interviews were then transcribed by members of the research group and then coded using ATLAS.TI, a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software.

Our intuition that textbooks would help us understand the discipline in Brazil is shared by legal scholars and scholars from other disciplines similarly concerned with the relationship between knowledge and power, who recognize textbooks at any educational level and in any discipline as a site for power relations and building blocks of disciplinary imagination. In fields as varied as sociology, 39 economics, 40 accounting, 41 language 42 and chemistry and physics, 43 scholars have recognized them as ‘a rich source of analysis for a range of research projects... an empirical ground on which to base investigation and... offer some intriguing lines of analysis to be mined and traced across disciplines’. 44 We draw from Linda Christian-Smith and Michael Apple’s The Politics of the Textbook , a seminal work about textbooks in the American school context, which highlights the importance that researchers broach textbooks not only as ‘hunter gatherers’ harvesting ‘social numbers’ 45 but also as mirrors reflecting social relations of inequality. Textbooks, to them as to us, are ‘artifacts’, ‘results of political, economic, and cultural activities, battles, and compromises’ ‘authored by real people with interests’ and ‘published within the political constraints of markets, resources, and power’. 46

In domestic law, American casebooks have been used as foils to better understand the gender and racial biases in torts, 47 contract 48 and criminal law. 49 Others have studied the market forces dictating casebook publishing in the USA. 50 In the United Kingdom (UK), domestic textbooks have been used to historicize the socialization of students into the Common Law and to write contemporary social histories of legal academia. 51 In international law, there are few, but significant, examples of scholarship dedicated to studying textbook/treatises. Tony Carty’s 1972 doctoral dissertation uses 19th-century textbooks to draw out ‘general patterns of thinking’ in international law, for instance by demonstrating the discipline’s ‘institutional turn’. 52 Carty argues that textbooks in the 19th century are ‘the only key to an understanding of the history and present nature of international law’, as areas of the discipline were ‘constructed and developed in these very books’. 53 He proposes, rather boldly, that we engage in reverse engineering in order to see that Article 38(1)’s other sources (treaties, custom, general principles, judicial decisions) are generated by textbooks and not the other way around. 54

Critical analysis of treatise-like books by prominent international lawyers has shown glimpses of these publications’ importance for the development of our disciplinary imagination. 55 Oppenheim and his International Law , 56 recognized as ‘probably the most influential English textbook of international law’, 57 is at the centre of narratives about the development of international legal positivism. In Mathias Schmoeckel’s narrative, Oppenheim’s textbook represents a turn towards modernity and systematicity, born out of a combination of the author’s Germanic sensibilities and historical context. Benedict Kingsbury centres the same book in a narrative about the building of positivism into the discipline, highlighting the political consequences of purporting to depoliticize the law. 58

Arnulf Becker Lorca uses selected Latin American textbooks to expertly trace semi-peripheral sensibilities of the discipline. He identifies textbooks’ ‘consolidated hold’ on Latin American perceptions of international law due to their extensive use by scholars and practitioners and their role of ‘[expressing] the professional common sense’, ‘building up a national lore’. 59 In saying this, Becker Lorca recognizes the role of textbooks as makers of international lawyers in Latin America as well as evidence of what they are made of – textbooks are simultaneously evidence of the features of a field as well as moulds that imprint themselves onto the field. We borrow his classification of textbooks as ‘universal’ or ‘particular’ in our analysis. 60

Ana Luisa Bernardino reflects on how textbooks have the power not only to include, but also to exclude, themes from the international legal field, reinforcing the invisible frames that help reproduce power relations in and through international law. 61 She highlights that textbooks educate aspiring international lawyers on what to think about and not think about and they concomitantly show the biases of our discipline – what international law(yers) choose(s) to keep out of the frame. 62 Textbooks ‘linger excessively on knowledge of the rules and principles of international law in detriment of all other considerations’ with no regard for what happens after cases are decided; they determine what counts as ‘general’ international law as opposed to what should remain in specialist areas or what should not be spoken about at all. 63

Theory also remains largely outside the realm of the textbooks that Bernardino looks at, which in turn cements them as ‘ the reality of international law’. 64 She also aptly discusses the ‘hidden curriculum’ of textbooks, 65 how they determine ‘what knowledge counts’ and concurrently what knowledge does not. 66 They often dismiss critique as ‘extreme or facile’ and inflate international law’s role in world affairs. 67 The state practice they pick out both reflects and reproduces power dynamics in international relations – the USA and the UK are given disproportionate attention, and other countries’ practice is seldom discussed. 68 She argues finally that ‘going by the book’ – pun intended – in international law means forfeiting modes of knowledge as well as limiting creativity and emancipatory ways of practising international law. In her words, ‘as important frames of the discipline, they police our perceptual world, determining what is visible and what is invisible, the sayable and the unsayable’. 69 Finally, she expounds how they create a professional hierarchy, where ‘the “masters” of international law maintain their god-like status’ due to their positioning as textbook authors as well as the authoritative language of textbooks themselves. 70

More recently, Henry Jones and Aoife O’Donoghue reflect upon how textbooks help or hinder teachers of international law who are invested in baring the discipline’s politics. 71 They choose to measure textbooks’ progressiveness through their engagement with the history of international law. They conclude that the textbooks published in English and widely used in Ireland – and possibly in England, Scotland and Wales – fail that goal. Their periodizations are ‘Eurocentric’, ‘state-centric’, ‘idealist intellectual’, ‘international institutionalist’ and ‘international normative’. 72 In Jones and O’Donoghue’s reading, there is insufficient engagement with ‘imperialism’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘colonization’. 73 The authors also criticize textbooks’ lack of citations of works beyond those of white European men. 74 Only Jan Klabbers’ and Gleider Hernández’s works meet (some) of the authors’ criteria for what constitutes a progressive international law textbook. Traditional favourites, such as works by James Crawford, Ian Brownlie, Malcolm Shaw and Malcolm Evans, largely miss the mark. 75

An analysis of textbooks in international law that approximates and informs ours was undertaken by Anthea Roberts in Is International Law International? 76 Her overall argument is that, despite its universalist veneer, international law has pronouncedly parochial characteristics. Looking at textbooks from selected states, she sought to verify how international law is taught, practised and understood in different countries – the project of ‘comparative international law’. 77 She defends that textbooks both ‘reflect and shape different approaches to international law in different states’. 78 Like us, she analyses both ‘the subjects these books focus on and the materials they use’ to understand the messages that are passed on to the students in the field and through which they are socialized as ‘international lawyers’. 79 She challenges the universalist ideal of Oscar Schachter’s ‘invisible college’, claiming that the international law profession is better described as a ‘divisible college’, in which national characteristics, shaped by states’ realpolitik , seep into international lawyers’ own understanding of international law.

Roberts concludes that, despite certain shortcomings, textbooks are ‘a visible and comparable measure for conducting cross-national studies’. 80 She measures the degree of ‘nationalization/ denationalization/ westernization’ of textbooks by looking at (i) the number of citations of domestic, domestic foreign and international case law; (ii) the number of citations of doctrine and the nationality of the authors cited; (iii) the topics substantively covered in textbooks from different states; and (iv) how certain key topics were treated in different states’ textbooks. 81 Roberts spends much time on how each nation’s interests shape different narratives within the textbooks in question and contrasts them with other countries’ textbooks in order to challenge international lawyers’ universalist presumptions. 82 Her conclusions are shaped by her emphasis on the five permanent members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council, which, as others have pointed out, 83 were always likely to wield results that emphasize the parochial over the universal.

Unlike Roberts, we are not interested in comparing different states’ textbooks. Rather, we are ascertaining the characteristics of individual textbooks in a single country – Brazil. We, however, use similar metrics to Roberts in order to verify how Brazilian textbooks fare in terms of patterns of citation of primary and secondary sources and whether there are any distinguishable Brazilian themes. 84 Literature from law and other disciplines uses textbooks in at least three ways. The first is by analysing their content – the topics covered (and not covered), the sources they use and the methodology they explicitly or implicitly employ. The second is by looking at their authors – what are their social markers in terms of nationality, race, sex and class; what are their academic backgrounds, career paths, social networks and their methodological affiliations. And the third is by looking at the context in which these textbooks are published – to whom these books are marketed, in what way they help further their authors’ careers and what these contextual aspects tell us about the functioning of a given field. We decided to present our results in a similar way: the content, the authors and the context of the aforementioned 10 textbooks, derived both from data harvested from textbooks themselves and from a series of semi-structured interviews with all textbook authors.

Here, we scrutinize the content of Brazilian textbooks to support our effort of unveiling their analytical, political and social possibilities. This section comprises two categories: themes most commonly explored and the sources on which they tend to rely, which, in our study, includes treaties, cases and secondary sources. We found no particular Brazilian themes broached in the textbooks. With regard to sources, multilateral treaties represent the majority of primary sources cited. The majority of secondary sources cited were written by Brazilian authors, followed by French authors. The majority of these works were written in, or translated into, Portuguese and authored overwhelmingly by men. These results are the coordinates we use to draw the map of international law in Brazil in later sections of this article. The methodology we use here can be replicated by scholars in other jurisdictions.

There are no unanimous themes approached by all textbooks. ‘Subjects of international law’, ‘international responsibility’, ‘settlement of disputes’ and ‘territory’ appear in nine out of 10 textbooks. Many textbooks devote space to ‘specialized’ areas of international law – international humanitarian law, in particular, is broached in nine textbooks, over what are usually considered ‘classic’ international law themes such as ‘sources’ (eight), ‘international law and domestic law’ (eight) and ‘use of force’ (six). As mentioned below, there are some connections between themes and the professional experience or academic interest of the authors in question, though this overlap is not absolute. 85 Some of the authors deliberately went on to write separate monographs on specific international law topics not covered by their textbooks.

We found very little evidence of deliberate choices to include themes due to regional or national significance. When we originally devised this research project, we expected that some particularly ‘Brazilian’ international law topics would be included – that is, detailed accounts of the functioning of MERCOSUR (Southern Common Market), the regional economic bloc of which Brazil is a party, or engagement with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) case law in which Brazil was a respondent. We thought the choice of themes would help us understand what Brazilian international lawyers perceive as relevant to international lawyers ‘in training’ in the country. However, these particularly regional themes are largely absent. With the exception of engaging domestic constitutional law to explain the relationship between Brazilian law and international law, there is no prevalence of regional themes in these textbooks. Their outlines largely resemble those of textbooks in English or French. Moreover, as remarked by Jones and O’Donoghue, textbooks’ ‘history’ chapters provide important clues as to the politics and methodological approaches they espouse. 86 We observed that Brazilian textbooks either do not speak of the discipline’s history or reproduce its most traditional European versions. Both Mello and Accioly, for example, dedicate sections to some of international law’s European ‘founding fathers’, such as Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius and Francisco Suárez, and do not name any additional local figures; they also do not dispute traditional historical narratives, such as the birth of modern international law in Westphalia. In other words, by and large, they tend to reproduce a top-down and universal conception of international law instead of investigating potentially local features of the field.

Part of the explanation for this is that, contrary to Roberts’ conclusions in her study of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, some areas of doctrinal international law are essentially the same everywhere: certain regimes, such as the law on state responsibility, the law of the sea and international humanitarian law, apply across the board independently of the state where one is located. However, as we will explore below, 87 it is clear that there are themes of particular regional significance. Brazilian international law textbooks do not make this apparent. In our interviews, one author went as far as saying that his textbooks could be translated and used in any jurisdiction in the same way that an English or French textbook could simply be translated into Portuguese and used in Brazil. 88 This perception that international law (and its textbooks) lack domestic identity was further confirmed in our interviews when authors were asked about Brazilian approaches to international law. They gave us largely unimpressed and generic answers, and only one author was able to identify traces of a Brazilian tradition. 89 These tentative and largely disengaged answers indicate that, if such a particular Brazilian international law identity does indeed exist, it is likely not the product of self-awareness (see Figure 1 ).

Content of each textbook by table of contents

B Sources Used

Preliminarily, we observed that the majority of these texts used very uneven referencing. Sometimes references in the body of the text did not overlap with the final bibliography. Often, case law is cited incompletely and, in the body of the text, without corresponding footnotes. This posed challenges in our data collection efforts and generated uncertainty about the provenance of certain statements. When questioned about referencing, one of the authors stated that editors explicitly advised him to drop a number of references as they were distracting to readers and took up too much space, increasing the textbooks’ costs. We hypothesize that this uneven referencing may be due, first, to textbooks’ peculiar standing as academic but not strictly scientific. One of the authors refers to not being bound by ‘scientific constraints’ while writing his textbook. 90 Another hypothesis is that references are incompatible with textbooks’ quasi-oral nature: they mimic the style of a lecturer’s script rather than a scholarly publication. 91 Two exceptions to this are Amaral Júnior and Mazzuoli, who are more systematic in their referencing. Unevenness aside, these textbooks do cite primary and secondary materials. We analyse these below, dividing them into treaties, cases and secondary sources.

We obtained data about the overall number of citations to treaties and separated those across multilateral, regional and bilateral treaties. The goal of collecting data on treaties cited in Brazilian textbooks is at least two-fold. First, we sought to compare the overall number of citations to treaties with those to case law. This could help confirm or disprove our intuitions that countries from Civil Law traditions, such as Brazil, privilege the authority of treaties over case law in their practice/understanding of international law. The overall numbers confirm this: citation to treaties largely surpasses that to case law – overall, Brazilian textbooks amass 8,342 citations to treaties compared to 1,882 citations to cases. Second, we use treaties to locate textbooks along a spectrum between universalism and particularism. We will elaborate on this dichotomy, which we borrow from Becker Lorca, in section 5.A. For now, it suffices to say that the blatant prominence of multilateral treaties over regional and bilateral instruments, which we have verified here, further indicates that Brazilian textbooks have ‘universalist’ tendencies (see Figure 2 ).

Percentage of multilateral, regional and bilateral treaties cited in each textbook

Similarly, our research mapped out citations to case law (see Figure 3 ). The overall number of citations to cases indicates a preference for using treaties over case law as sources – 1,882 citations to cases and 8,342 citations to treaties. This is despite the involvement of the authors’ overlapping occupations as private practitioners and domestic/international judges, which could arguably lead to more engagement with case law. 92 Such a tendency could indicate, as aforementioned, a reflection of Brazilian authors’ education in the Civil Law tradition, which is said to privilege legal texts and doctrine as sources over case law. Roberts also notes a stronger reliance on treaties over case law in Russian and Chinese textbooks. 93 She suggests that this may be because case law is not available in languages accessible to Chinese and Russian readers. 94 This may also help explain our findings.

Percentage of international, domestic (Brazil) and domestic (other countries) cases cited in each textbook

Second, we sought to find out whether there were jurisdictional preponderances among these cases. We theorized that the use of cases from international courts and tribunals would indicate ‘universalist’ tendencies, whereas the use of Brazilian domestic cases, or cases from other Latin American countries, would indicate increased concern with local concerns. The large majority of cases cited (81.29 per cent) were international; 13.67 per cent were domestic (Brazilian); and 5.08 per cent were domestic (other), with no particular Latin American regional preponderance. This confirmed our findings in the quantification of multilateral treaty citation, which also indicated universalist tendencies as far as the citation of primary documents is concerned.

3 Secondary Sources

We analysed the use of secondary materials referenced in Brazilian textbooks, documenting the nationality and gender of all authors of these materials cited as well as the language of works cited. The proportion of nationalities of authors cited across all textbooks reveals a large preponderance of foreign authors. The overall number of French authors surpasses all other nationalities (at 16.08 per cent), except Brazilian (34.73 per cent). British and American authors follow at 6.78 per cent and 6.12 per cent, respectively. We also sorted citations by language, as Brazilian academic practice often makes use of translations of foreign texts to Portuguese. We found that the majority of works cited were published in Portuguese (38.7 per cent) but that French closely followed at 33.8 per cent. English is the third most utilized language of sources cited, at 21.2 per cent. In half of the textbooks, French is the most utilized language of secondary source citations: Accioly et al. 31.41 per cent, Carreau and Bichara 62.69 per cent, Mello 37.79 per cent, Rezek 18.98 per cent and Varella 45.23 per cent (see Figure 4 ). The nationality of authors cited and the language of secondary sources used both support our intuition that Brazilian textbooks overall uphold a ‘universalist’ view of international law, not necessarily sensitive to Brazilian / Latin American local perceptions of the discipline, as we expound upon in section 5.A. The ‘Eurocentric’ pattern in citations is also an indication of the academic paths of the authors concerned. Many of them obtained their advanced degrees or spent substantial time in European institutions, where they were exposed to European legal doctrines that shaped their understanding of the discipline. This preponderance of European citations over Brazilian/regional authors reflects the textbook authors’ perception that it is for European countries to ‘produce’ international law and for countries in the periphery and semi-periphery to ‘reproduce’ their ideas, even if unwittingly. 95

Percentages of different author nationalities cited in each textbook

* Nationalities with generally less than 5 per cent of total citations are added under ‘Others’. 98

Some experts, however, expected the preponderance of non-Brazilian – European and Anglo-Saxon – citations to be even higher than what we observed. 96 Possible reasons for this could be: (i) barriers to access to foreign publications – for example, paywalls and high import costs; (ii) language barriers, as not all authors have working knowledge of foreign languages; and (iii) a cultural tradition to cite fellow Brazilians who are part of the authors' same epistemic community. In this sense, it could be a deliberate political choice to cite Brazilian colleagues, as opposed to Europeans, as a tool to increase one’s social capital amongst peers. 97 Authors cited are overwhelmingly men. Individual textbooks’ citations vary from 87.74 per cent men, at their most gender diverse, to 100 per cent men, at their least gender diverse. Amongst the few women cited are Claudia Lima Marques, Deisy Ventura, Flavia Piovesan, Gilda Russomano and Nadia de Araujo. We observed that many of them are Brazilians themselves. We do not suggest that authors deliberately chose to exclude knowledge produced by women authors; the interviews in fact confirm that the textbook authors were sensitive to gender equality’s importance as a broad goal in academia and in society more generally. However, these concerns were not translated into positive action to improve citation diversity, as acknowledged by the authors themselves.

This section reads ‘between the lines’ of Brazilian textbooks in order to unveil hidden features of how international law is taught, practised and reproduced in Brazil. Our analysis for this section is divided into three subsections: universalism versus particularism, project textbooks versus instrument textbooks and the ‘Brazilian’ invisible college of international lawyers.

A ‘Universalism’ versus ‘Particularism’

From the start of the project, we aimed at understanding whether Brazilian international law textbooks – and, consequently, in our proposition, Brazilian international law – had parochial characteristics and concerns with differentiating itself from universalist traditions of the discipline. 99 We expected that these characteristics would reveal particular Brazilian interests peeping through the content of textbooks as well as their sources. What we found instead is that most textbooks we analysed, with some notable exceptions, did not have a particular Brazilian flavour. These results are informed by Becker Lorca’s insight in his study of Latin American textbooks, where he develops the terminology of ‘particularism’ in contrast with ‘universalism’. 100 The universalist pole’s common characteristics are the presentation of international law as a ‘global’ project with no national affiliation – a cosmopolitan endeavour that is neutral, technical and universal. Particularist international law textbooks, on the other hand, reveal some cognizance of the potential pitfalls of a universal international law and appropriate the discipline strategically in defending regional or national interests. 101 As Becker Lorca himself suggests, textbooks exist on a spectrum between these two poles, and rigid classifications would be artificial. What we do here is elaborate on this sliding scale, explaining how each work falls closer to one or another side of the spectrum.

We sought to identify universalist/particularist tendencies in Brazilian textbooks in the following ways; first, in the choice of themes explored – for example, is there an emphasis on local/regional histories or institutions in the body of the text; are there reflections about Latin American or American international law; and to what extent do they explore the incorporation of international law to domestic law? We also looked at their sources – what is the proportion of multilateral ‘universal’ treaties cited versus regional/bilateral treaties; are there domestic and regional as well as international cases in the footnotes; what is the nationality of authors cited as secondary authorities; are they Brazilian, Latin American, from the global South or the global North; and what is the language of the secondary sources cited: French, English, Portuguese or Spanish?

We organized the textbooks on a sliding scale between the universalist and particularist poles. In doing so, we sought to harmonize data obtained about each of the aforementioned indicators. The overall view suggests that, with a few exceptions, Brazilian textbooks in general have a preference for universalist, traditional, even Eurocentric views of the discipline. Some would fall under the ‘true universalist’ category (Accioly et al.), whereas others (Carreau and Bichara, Varella, Nasser) fall under a ‘universalist lite’ category that is concerned with some national/regional themes. Another intermediate category uses a greater number of national/regional sources but still operates from a largely universalist perspective that assimilates European perceptions (Rezek, Guerra, Amaral Júnior). Husek, Mazzuoli and Varella’s works have stronger particularist affiliations in some respects – they place emphasis on international law’s interaction with the Brazilian Constitution.

Mello, on the other end of that scale, despite his wide use of European references, focuses on regional/domestic themes such as the history of regional integration, American international law and the international law of development, indicating the strongest particularist tendencies amongst all the textbooks analysed. He positions himself as someone who writes about international law from the semi-periphery. While far from forging a Brazilian identity to international law, his textbook is infused by what we identify as a global South sensibility. In his very illuminating prefaces to every new edition, he sides with other Third World scholars to criticize the structure of international law. One good illustration of this semi-peripheral sensibility is how he disputes the subfield of international economic law, placing development concerns at the heart of the discipline. 102

These conclusions also help add complexity to Roberts’ study of textbooks from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, which led her to assert that parochial characteristics are easily discernible. If we look at semi-peripheral states’ textbooks, such as Brazil’s, 103 national interests seem less likely to influence the content and materials cited. What we have found, overall, is that Brazilian textbooks by and large reproduce universalist conceptions of international law in content and form. This universalist bend is further confirmed by our interviews with the authors, where questions about a ‘Brazilian identity’ of their textbook were met with puzzlement or outright rejection. 104 Our findings, in this sense, mirror those of Babatunde Fagbayibo in relation to the teaching of international law in the African continent. 105

B Between Technique and (Overt) Politics: Textbooks as Projects or Instruments

Another feature we identified is that some textbooks treat the discipline as a largely technical enterprise to be taught and ‘instrumentalized’, whereas others have a distinctive authorial flair, articulating a particular ‘project’ for international law, which led us to classify them under two rubrics: ‘instrument’ and ‘project’ textbooks. While we recognize that the ‘project’ and ‘instrument’ archetypes are somewhat reductionist, we believe they help us articulate important features of these works that would otherwise remain unnamed. These features mirror the phenomenon described by Martti Koskenniemi as afflicting the discipline itself – that of international law transitioning from a political cosmopolitan project into a technique of global governance (managerialism). 106 Whereas Koskenniemi attributes a negative connotation to the ‘managerial’ turn in international law, we understand ‘project’ and ‘instrument’ textbooks as mere descriptions of two different approaches. These different approaches are a product both of the changes in global disciplinary sensibilities identified by Koskenniemi and, perhaps most of all, of the modifications to the Brazilian legal education market, legal publishing landscape and profiles of textbook authors.

1 ‘Project’ Textbooks

Some of the features of ‘project’ textbooks in our characterization are quite tangible – the erudition and technicity of their language, allied with a systemic approach to international law and an engagement with theoretical/systemic themes in the discipline. Their main distinctive characteristic, however, is that they are infused with the authors’ particular sensibilities about the discipline. Neither of the four textbooks we classified under this rubric – Accioly et al.’s, Mello’s, Rezek’s and Amaral Júnior’s – subscribes to a common ‘project’. They are all very different beasts. Accioly and colleagues’ work portrays international law as a cosmopolitan project. Its language is erudite and technical, conveying Accioly’s approach to international law as a discipline made by, and directed at, the ‘cultured erudite man’. 107 In the preface to the book’s first edition, the author asserts that ‘no cultured man can completely ignore the existence of international law’. 108 Despite the arduous work done under Nascimento e Silva and Casella to update the original work by Accioly, erudition remains one of its central features. Its authorship and target audience explain its prolixity – both Accioly and Nascimento e Silva were career diplomats and wrote with diplomats and statesmen in mind.

The book must also be understood in its historical context. Its first edition is from 1948 when international law in Brazil was largely studied by those following a diplomatic career, then the purview of white elites who had economic and social standing, what Karla Gobo Pinto refers to as the Noblesse d’État . 109 There is an indication that Accioly’s prestige extended beyond the borders of Brazil: he is cited in early editions of Oppenheim and in Roberto Ago’s work on state responsibility before the International Law Commission, perhaps relativizing the understanding that influences between the global North and global South were always unidirectional. The sophisticated, but somewhat cumbersome, tone of this textbook can be seen as a result of the convergence of its authorship, audience and historical context.

Mello’s textbook shows the author’s sensitivity to Third World concerns. As we expounded in section 5.A., this is a textbook that most privileges a local perspective – for instance, by disputing the concept of international development and discussing Latin American regional integration. Mello explores, in encyclopaedic form, international law from a place of ‘localism’, with discernible Third World sensibilities that are epistemologically critical. Common in his oeuvre are statements such as that ‘international law should be an instrument in the fight against under-development’. 110 His idea of international law as a progressive political project can be seen in the lengthy and candid prefaces he attached to his work, where he makes bold statements about international law and its politics. In the preface to the book’s ninth edition, he criticizes the dictatorship’s choice to remove international law from the list of compulsory subjects in the law school curriculum, heavily criticizes the role of capitalism in perpetuating inequality between states and reveals his scorn for neo-liberalism.

We can attribute the difference in tone between Mello’s textbook and other works analysed here to his openly centre-left political inclinations. 111 We can also speculate that the historical moment in which its first edition was published (1967) helps explain its politics – it was both the time of the New International Economic Order 112 and the heyday of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Although Mello himself was not a career diplomat, he had ties to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, having taught in the Instituto Rio Branco, Brazil’s diplomatic graduate school, between 1973 and 1976. His work was often cited in official Foreign Ministry legal briefs and by the Brazilian Supreme Court in matters of international law. 113 Unlike Accioly et al.’s textbook, Mello’s book ceased to be re-edited after his passing in 2005, but it is still highly influential in Brazilian law school curricula and remains a staple in international law circles.

Our third textbook in the ‘project’ category is Rezek’s. His textbook is one of the most respected in Brazilian diplomatic circles and elite law schools. Anecdotally, those studying for the highly competitive entrance exam to become a Brazilian diplomat are told to prepare for the international law exam using his book. Rezek is a member of the Brazilian bureaucratic elite and a bona fide member of the ‘invisible college’ of international lawyers. He is the only author in our roster to have been a judge at the Brazilian Supreme Court (elected twice in 1983–1990 and 1992–1997), a deputy attorney general in 1979, president of the Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court (1989–1990), Brazilian minister of foreign affairs (1990–1992) and later elected as a judge to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) (1997–2006). After leaving the ICJ, he went into private practice in Brazil and has often been appointed as arbitrator to high-profile tribunals under the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes and the International Court of Arbitration of the Paris International Chamber of Commerce. 114

Rezek’s illustrious career path is well imprinted in his textbook, placing it in an interesting position in the universalist-particularist spectrum that we propose here. On the one hand, he centres the Brazilian experience: he uses a plethora of Brazilian domestic decisions and explores the Brazilian legislation and practice of treaty internalization. He also cites a majority of authors who are Brazilian – many citations are to his own scholarship, judicial opinions and expert reports. On the other hand, despite this nationalistic slant, Rezek does not share Mello’s left-wing view of the domestic. He supports a conservative take on diplomacy and international law. Rezek self-identified during his interview as a positivist, centring state sovereignty and state consent and outwardly rejecting ‘human-centric’ approaches to international law. His textbook is divided into traditional sections (sources, subjects, state responsibility, governance of the global commons, peaceful settlement of disputes and war) and espouses traditional views on substantive issues. This is congruent with his alignment with the conservative political forces in Brazil that are responsible for his appointments to prestigious institutions during his career. Thus, we chose to describe his ‘project’ textbook as one of conservative localism.

We also classify as a ‘project textbook’ Amaral Júnior’s. His book’s project is to ‘modernize’ the Brazilian international legal field. In his interview, he discloses a desire to provide an alternative to the French tradition prevalent in Brazilian international law textbooks, which he perceives as descriptive, stifling, dogmatic and antiquated. He chooses to replace it with an interdisciplinary, dynamic and institutionally focused approach to the discipline. Amaral Júnior is the only textbook author to state that he wishes to cater to international relations students in addition to law students 115 and those preparing for the Instituto Rio Branco. 116 His thorough referencing and research – the table of authorities in his textbook reaches 53 pages – contrasts with most other textbooks’ sparse, uneven referencing and orality. This connects to his full-time dedication to academia. However, modernizing, in Amaral Júnior’s view, is synonymous with substituting the French for the anglophone textbook model – he asserts in his interview that he feels most connected to schools of thought rooted in Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, New York University and Harvard and mentions a series of anglophone authors as his main influences. This is in stark contrast with most other authors, who deem France and The Hague to be the main loci of power and knowledge in the discipline. Although he does not disregard French scholarship (13.4 per cent of citations are to French authors), he mostly cites Brazilian academics (23.1 per cent), followed by US scholars (16.6 per cent). Despite the deference to British academia revealed in his interview, reference to British authors amounts to only 8.7 per cent of the citations in his book. 117

In summary, ‘project textbooks’ differentiate themselves from their ‘instrument’ counterparts in their content and spirit: they espouse more or less discernible authorial ideas and do not only posit to reproduce the discipline ‘as is’. Accioly et al.’s textbook reproduces a conservative liberal sensibility, Mello infuses his textbook with Third World concerns, Rezek seeks to balance domestic Brazilian sources and conservative voluntarist views and Amaral Júnior tries to ‘modernize’ the landscape through interdisciplinarity and anglicization to counter the otherwise prevalent French tradition in Brazilian textbooks. Despite their contrasting political messages, these books are united in the ‘project’ category as they (i) seek to exhaust the content of international law; (ii) use relatively prolix language; and (iii) are infused with the particular political and intellectual sensibilities of their authors. Unlike their ‘instrument’ counterparts, they are primarily directed neither at undergraduate law students nor at most internal Brazilian bureaucracy; instead, they converse with local internationalized elites, such as those in the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and some international stakeholders through their translations.

The characteristics of ‘project textbooks’ highlighted here reveal a dichotomy. On the one hand, they enshrine the elitist underpinnings of international law as a practice and academic enterprise in Brazil. They are also all predominantly ‘universalist’ and, with the exception of Mello, do not espouse particularly progressive agendas. On the other hand, their rigorous exhaustive nature and clearer political underpinnings contribute to an understanding of international law in Brazil as a locus for political disputation and world making.

2 Textbooks as ‘Technical Tools’: The ‘Instrument’ Textbooks

‘Instrument’ textbooks share two main characteristics: first, they adopt a less formal language than their ‘project’ counterparts and, second, they do not articulate a clear authorial vision and do not present a discernible political project, instead expounding upon technical aspects of international law from the point of view of the Brazilian bureaucracy. Their authors’ disengagement with international law’s politics is often overt – Interviewee no. 2 asserted in the preface to his textbook’s first edition that ‘he does not intend to dissect "new" or "classic" discussions in international law’. 118 Interviewee no. 4 also expressly asserted in his interview that he does not delve into ‘theory’, and Interviewee no. 5 stated that he does not intend his book to be ‘critical’. The purported absence of ‘politics’, which is in itself an engagement in a ‘politics’ of its own, affiliates these authors with a tradition that sees international law as ‘neutral’ and does not question what lies behind the label of ‘international’, associated with the ‘universalist’ tendencies expounded upon above. 119 A less charitable reading of these textbooks could see them merely as a reflection of the discipline’s newfound managerialism, 120 but we chose to also understand them contextually. Temporally, we hypothesize that these ‘late-comer’ textbooks needed to differentiate themselves from their prolix ‘project’ predecessors as briefer and more accessible, closer to ‘handbooks’ than to ‘treatises’. In our view, ‘instrument textbooks’ are ambitious agenda setters in their own right in the sense that they help shape or lead the discipline towards a more technical and managerial, rather than overtly political, path.

The particular features of the Brazilian legal landscape might also have contributed to the rise of ‘instrument’ textbooks. First, there is the huge number of Brazilian law students with particular pedagogic requirements. In 2020, Brazil had more than 1,200 law schools, with varying degrees of excellence in teaching and performance in the qualifying Brazilian bar exam. 121 In all these law schools, international law is a compulsory module. 122 This creates a market for simplified compact textbooks for students’ consumption. ‘Instrument’ textbooks’ accessible language and less cumbersome engagement with international law’s theoretical underpinnings cater to this market, as the authors themselves seem to recognize. Interviewee no. 7 specifically mentioned that a goal for his book was to oppose ‘a conservative doctrine of international law’ that he conflates with excessive theoreticism. Interviewee no. 4 and Interviewee no. 5 made similar assertions that their work is directed towards those uninitiated in the language of international law. 123 Interviewee no. 4 and Interviewee no. 7 expressly asserted that they wrote with their respective classrooms in mind and used their own undergraduate teaching materials as a template for their books. All ‘instrument textbook’ authors were thus concerned less with articulating an authorial view of international law and more with helping students navigate the discipline.

Another potential stimulant for the proliferation of ‘instrument textbooks’ is the popularization and increased internationalization 124 of legal civil servant careers in Brazil. Access to the Brazilian civil service is gained through competitive public entrance exams ( concursos in Portuguese). Those wishing to prepare for these exams have formed a market for easily digestible materials targeting specific exam requirements. Legal publishing houses responded by commissioning legal academics to produce such work, including international lawyers. It is thus credible that international law textbooks, once lengthy tomes written for and by political elites, would transition towards more simplified summaries of international law topics suitable for concursos preparation, aligned with the ‘instrument’ textbook category. When asked about the impact of concursos on their work, some authors openly acknowledged that they seek to reach out to this audience by, for example, including summaries of relevant topics alongside the main text. 125 Most authors, however, were reluctant to acknowledge any direct connection between their work and these exams. 126 In our view, this may be because Brazilian academics consider that succumbing to the irresistible market pull of civil service entrance exams cheapens one’s work. In any event, ‘instrument’ textbooks' affinity with concurso students might have positive unintended consequences for their authors – namely, an increase in citations by the domestic courts in which these former students go on to work as civil servants. Mazzuoli’s popularity amongst concurso students, for example, could be one of the factors that cemented his position as one of the most cited international lawyers by Brazilian domestic courts, including the Supreme Court.

The characteristics of ‘instrument’ textbooks may also be a reflection of the professional backgrounds of their authors, whose experiences of international law and institutions are more parochial than those of ‘project’ textbook authors. Mazzuoli is an academic with much success in the burgeoning law publishing industry in Brazil, whereas Guerra and Husek are both practitioners (private practitioner and labour law judge, respectively). Nasser is a partner at a São Paulo law firm. Varella is a public servant, part of the Executive Branch bureaucracy. Their connections to domestic, rather than transnational, practice may help explain their inclinations towards a more objective language, briefer form and greater preoccupation with how international law is applied in Brazilian institutions.

These ‘instrument’ textbooks have advantages and disadvantages in relation to the ‘project’ archetype: first, by rejecting the erudition of the likes of Accioly et al. and Mello, they make our historically elitist discipline more accessible to the wider public. In a way, they are much more appropriate to the teaching of international law in a country such as Brazil, where the study of law has become ubiquitous and materials in English are inaccessible to Portuguese-speaking students. ‘Instrument’ textbooks are also written with international law’s domestic practice in mind, targeting the needs of the increasingly transnational Brazilian bureaucracy, including but not limited to domestic courts. On the other hand, by not acknowledging the political underpinnings of the discipline and proposing to describe it in isolation from theory, they contribute to the perpetuation of the inherent politics and contingencies of the ‘international’. They can also be associated with the ‘managerial’ approach described by Koskenniemi – specialized, technical, fragmented, institutionalized – that is now the hallmark of our profession. 127 We see this category of textbooks as artefacts that both reflect certain characteristics of international law in contemporary Brazil and further entrench such characteristics, as they continue to be used by students and practitioners in the country.

C The Brazilian ‘Invisible College’

In this section, we map out the professional international law landscape in Brazil through the prism of textbooks. We have mapped out the institutions in which authors studied and where they currently teach as well as their professional paths beyond academia. During the interviews, we asked them to self-identify in terms of gender and race as well as sexual orientation. Authors were also invited to identify their mentors and interlocutors and to locate the main fora where ideas circulate in international law. By dissecting textbook authors’ profiles, we were able not only to shed light on the characteristics of this particular powerful group of individuals but also to make statements about the functioning of the Brazilian ‘invisible college of international lawyers’ more broadly.

1 Academic Background and Academic Affiliation

Two main findings stand out regarding authors’ academic backgrounds; first, the strong presence of French academia in their formation – six textbook authors have passed through French academic institutions. Carreau and Bichara partnered up to adapt a French textbook for a Brazilian readership. They are French and French/Brazilian, respectively, educated at the University of Paris. Rezek and Varella did their doctoral degrees at the University of Paris. Casella and Nasser did master’s programmes at the University of Paris as well. Second, most authors were educated and/or work in south-east Brazilian academic institutions, especially institutions in the state of São Paulo. Amaral Júnior, Casella and Nasser did their doctoral degrees at the University of São Paulo. Husek obtained his doctorate from the Catholic University of São Paulo, and Mazzuoli did his master’s in São Paulo as well (Universidade Estadual Paulista). Mello and Guerra obtained their advanced law degrees from schools in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Universities in the southern states also appear in the authors’ biographies: Varella obtained a master’s degree from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, and Mazzuoli did his doctoral degree at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. The south-east region of Brazil, especially São Paulo, is also where most authors teach international law. Amaral Júnior and Casella are affiliated with the University of São Paulo; Husek teaches at the Catholic University of São Paulo, and Nasser at FGV São Paulo School of Law. Mello taught for many years before his passing in Rio de Janeiro, where Guerra currently teaches. Rezek and Varella teach at Centro Universitário de Brasília in the Brazilian capital of Brasília (see Figure 5 and Figure 6 ).

Educational trajectory of textbook authors by Brazilian federal state

Professional affiliation of textbook authors by Brazilian federal state

2 Professional Background: Relationship between Academia and Practice?

Most textbook authors straddle academia and legal practice. 128 In addition to teaching, other professional placements include federal labour judge (Husek), lawyer in private practice (Mazzuoli and Guerra) and public servant in the Brazilian executive branch (Varella). However, as one of our interviewees suggested, ‘textbook authors’ private practice is rarely connected to public international law’; their professional practice outside of academia stays mostly in Brazilian domestic institutions rather than in the ‘international bar’. 129 There are three exceptions to this finding: Accioly and the first heir to his textbook, Nascimento e Silva, were both career diplomats. Rezek, after many years in the high echelons of Brazilian domestic legal practice, reached the Brazilian Supreme Court and became minister of foreign affairs and judge at the ICJ. Currently, he is in private practice and acts as an investment and international commercial arbitrator.

We observe connections between textbook authors’ career paths and the content of their respective textbooks. For instance, Mello’s judgeship at the Brazilian Sea Tribunal, an administrative court located in Rio de Janeiro, runs parallel to his inclusion of six distinct law-of-the-sea chapters in his textbook. 130 Amaral Júnior’s doctorate in consumer law might have led him to include details about the area in his textbook. His specialization in international economic law helps explain why he dedicates significant textbook sections to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and MERCOSUR. Rezek has a large number of citations to judgments of the Brazilian Supreme Court in his book, which corresponds to his two mandates at that Court. He has also written a monograph and several academic articles about the law of treaties, which is reflected in his textbook’s extensive analysis of the subject. Husek’s work as a labour law judge is aligned with his choice to include a chapter in his book about the International Labour Organization. The reverse is also true – some authors who have written extensively about a certain topic (for example, Varella and international environmental law) have opted to publish specialized monographs on those subjects rather than expanding their textbooks.

3 Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation: A Complex Relationship

Because we see texts as being ‘produced by real people with real interests’, 131 we sought to dwell on how identity – and not only one’s career path – could influence textbooks. We thus included a question at the end of our interviews that asked authors to self-identify around three markers: race, sex and sexual orientation. All authors of all textbooks we analysed identified as men. Most of them identified as heterosexual. One of them identifies himself as a gay man, while others chose not to answer. For the ‘race’ marker, we relied on the interviewee’s own self-description. The large majority of authors self-described as ‘white’, with three of them characterizing themselves as ‘non-white’ (pardo), ‘Arab’ or ‘Phoenician’. One of the authors discusses his ability to tan as a relevant racial marker.

Whereas all authors were sensitive to racial, sexual and gender discrimination, most struggled to connect these markers to the substance of their work in any significant way. One interviewee, in particular, said that he would not answer our question as he did not see how race, gender or sexuality would have any bearing on his work. Others made broad statements about developments in human rights legislation prohibiting race, gender and sex discrimination or siloed these issues as ‘human rights’ concerns, not belonging to general international law. The one notable exception to this pattern was the author who identified as a gay man, who recognized that his positionality impacted his work – for instance, in his choice to address certain human rights developments in the protection of the rights of LGBTQIA+ people in his textbook.

Overall, our findings mirror what those studying the intersections of identity and international law already articulate 132 – international lawyers in particular, and lawyers in general, find it difficult to acknowledge how their identities form their biases and, in turn, shape their work. They also reflect Brazil’s fraught relationship to race, in particular, although the ramifications of this are beyond the scope of this article. 133 We sustain that only by acknowledging these biases through self-reflection can one attempt to engage with international law in a more responsible manner. 134

4 Social Networks, Spaces for the Exchange of Ideas and Building Prestige through Textbooks

In order to understand certain social aspects of the Brazilian international law landscape, we posed questions to our interviewees about who their mentors were/are in Brazil and beyond, about their intellectual influences and about the role that textbooks had in building up their careers, and we also asked them to locate the places in which, in their view, ideas circulate in the discipline, domestically and internationally. Their answers, read in light of the analysis of their biographies and respective textbooks, allowed us to draw some conclusions about international lawyers’ social networks, the spaces that are influential for the discipline in Brazil and the relationship between textbook authorship and prestige in the field in the country.

These interviews led to four major findings. First, there is a strong connection between France and Brazil when it comes to international law. 135 This is especially interesting if we consider that Brazil was a former Portuguese colony. Thus, a liaison to that country would be easier to explain for linguistic and colonial reasons. The connection to France is indicated not only by the aforementioned preponderance of citations to French authors but also by the connections between textbook authors, French academic institutions and French international law professors. 136 Many authors list French mentors and interlocutors as relevant people in their professional networks – Carreau, Alain Pellet, Mireille Delmas-Marti and Pierre-Marie Dupuy show up on more than one occasion. Interviewees no. 3, no. 8 and no. 9 reveal in their interviews that they follow international law developments through French jurisprudential repositories. The most direct example of the connection between France and Brazil when it comes to international law is Carreau and Bichara’s textbook. Their co-authored textbook is an almost literal translation of Carreau’s original French text to Portuguese with selected adaptations, and even its current publisher, Pedone, is located in France.

Second, when asked about the international law loci for the circulation of ideas, authors mentioned international and domestic fora. The Hague Academy of International Law is a fundamental locus from which ideas and authoritative scholarship emerge for these authors. It was identified almost universally. Many authors cited specific Recueil by name as sources for their books, indicating the academy’s prestige in Brazilian international law circles. 137 Domestically, two institutions stand out: first, the Brazilian Supreme Court, which is the most cited domestic court in the textbooks themselves. Conversely, in the interviews, being cited by the Supreme Court is presented as a measure of prestige and influence. The other influential Brazilian institution according to our work is the Brazilian diplomatic academy, the Instituto Rio Branco. Its centrality is revealed already in our analysis of authors’ biographies, their connections to the Instituto cropping up in different forms. Mello lectured there, Amaral Júnior produced materials to prepare Rio Branco students for the diplomatic entrance exam and Accioly and Nascimento e Silva, both diplomats, studied there. In the interviews, authors highlighted their proximity to the Rio Branco often – they mentioned how their textbooks are used by those studying for the Rio Branco’s entrance exam or reveal that they have adjusted the content of the textbook to serve this purpose, suggesting that they consider connections between their work and the Instituto as a measure of prestige.

Third, we noticed two international lawyers – Mello, the author of one of the books we studied, and Antônio Augusto Cançado Trindade, former ICJ and IACtHR judge – appear as central figures in the country’s professional landscape. They stand out, aside from the aforementioned French individuals, as central to the social networks of our textbook authors. Mello, himself the author of one of the books we studied, is mentioned by four interviewees as a mentor and intellectual influence. Cançado Trindade’s prolific writing did not include a traditional textbook, but we knew instinctively of his importance given our positionality as Brazilian international lawyers and knew that any map of the field in Brazil would be incomplete without his name. As suggested in a workshop organized at the University of Sheffield by commentators George Galindo and Becker Lorca, Cançado Trindade was the proverbial elephant in the room in our project – his presence simultaneously obscured and looming because of our chosen source of analysis. The interviews allowed us to weave him in and thus do some justice to the legacy and influence we knew he had. He appears, first, as some authors’ mentor and intellectual reference. Least expectedly, Cançado showed up by stealth during our interview with Rezek, whom Cançado Trindade succeeded at the ICJ. Rezek’s unprompted rejections of doctrines that centre on individual human beings in international law are echoes of their intellectual differences. These topics were known areas of disagreement between the two former ICJ judges.

Finally, we found suggestions that textbooks function as a means to harness prestige in the field in Brazil and help to propel one’s career. We found that some authors associate authorship of textbooks with status and career progression. Two statements in particular stand out; Interviewee no. 7 asserts that writing a textbook is expected if one becomes a professor at a renowned law school. Interviewee no. 3 identifies a causal connection between publishing his textbook and an increase in invitations to speak all over Brazil and abroad.

Whereas our work thus far has focused on documenting presences – mapping the content of these works and the choices behind them through interviews with the authors – we were inspired by the work of Bernardino to notice the absences in these texts. 138 Much like what ‘is’ there, what is consciously or unconsciously erased from these textbooks also constitutes the identity of international law (textbooks) in Brazil. The first noticeable absence is the connection between international law and colonization and decolonization processes. Brazil, like other former colonies, is a byproduct of imperialism. It is therefore expected that international law textbooks attuned with the country’s history would explore the relationship of international law with the ‘discovery’ of the country as well as with the movements that contributed to its independence. The textbooks we analysed, however, are silent about this subject. This may be associated, first of all, with the general absence of analysis of the relationship between law, imperialism and colonization from most Western textbooks, 139 from which Brazilian textbooks widely cite and draw. Because Brazilian textbook authors tend to rely on Western textbooks, it is unsurprising that they do not consider that relationship part of international law, much less Brazil’s engagement with it.

Connected to this first point is the absence of Brazil’s violent relationship to race. 140 Brazil has the largest contingent of black people in the world outside of Africa. 141 These numbers are not a product of voluntary migration but, rather, of the longest period of the slave trade in the world. 142 The relationship between Brazil, international law and slavery is absent from Brazilian textbooks. Likewise, these textbooks fail to document the connection between Indigenous peoples and the various segments of international law – from land rights to the health and cultural rights of these communities. The past and ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples in Brazil remains outside the remit of international law textbooks.

In the particular realm of international human rights law, other important absences are felt in Brazilian international law textbooks. First is Brazil’s relationship with its dictatorial past. From 1964 to 1985, Brazil underwent a military dictatorship that submitted a large number of people to severe human rights violations, including the assassination of members of the political opposition, forced disappearances, torture, rape and other types of inhumane and degrading treatment. Unlike other countries in the region that submitted their former military officials to trials as part of the re-democratization process, Brazil opted for amnesty. This absence is especially poignant given that important international law developments occurred in this area, including judgments against Brazil’s own amnesty laws before the IACtHR. 143 The politically tense military period and its aftermath is generally excluded from Brazilian international law textbooks.

Another gap in Brazilian textbooks is international law’s relationship to gender and sexuality. This is despite the fact that domestic violence legislation in Brazil 144 resulted from its condemnation before the IACtHR in a case brought by activist and survivor Maria da Penha. 145 Brazil’s criminalization of homosexuality in the Military Criminal Code and extremely restrictive abortion rights laws are also absent from these textbooks. 146 One cannot help but draw connections between these absences and the very low number of citations to women in the textbooks that composed our sample as well as the absence of current textbooks authored by women in the country.

Another very common absence in Brazilian international law textbooks is the role of international law and international institutions in managing and perpetuating economic inequality and poverty. Some of the textbooks have sections on international economic law, but they tend to be descriptive of the laws of MERCOSUR and the WTO. Mello is an exception, as he takes a critical stance on the role of law as an instrument used to perpetuate asymmetrical relations between countries in the global South and the global North. By and large, Brazilian international law textbooks replicate the approach taken on international economic law issues present in mainstream Western textbooks.

The article discusses an analysis of the 10 most prominent international law textbooks used in Brazil and the interviews conducted with their living authors. The main findings include that: (i) the textbooks examined do not prominently feature Brazilian-specific themes, focusing instead on universal international law topics; (ii) French and Brazilian authors are frequently cited in the textbooks, with Portuguese being the predominant language of publication; (iii) there is very limited gender diversity in the citations; and (iv) the textbooks generally promote a universal view of international law rather than emphasizing national or regional aspects. We have classified the textbooks on a spectrum between ‘project’ (erudite and with a distinctive authorial perspective) and ‘instrument’ (more concise and technical). We have attributed these characteristics to trends within the discipline in general and within the Brazilian legal landscape in particular.

As for the authors’ profiles, we have identified the centrality of south-eastern Brazilian universities and of French academia in their formation. The study identifies the significance of the Hague Academy of International Law in Brazilian international law circles. The Brazilian Supreme Court and the Instituto Rio Branco have been highlighted as influential domestic institutions. We also observed a complex relationship between the authors and the issues related to race, gender and sexual orientation. Some critical topics, such as international law’s relationship to colonialism, race, gender, transitional justice and economic inequality, are notably absent from these textbooks.

Some of our findings support the assertion that knowledge moves unidirectionally in international law – the global North ‘produces’ knowledge, and the global South ‘reproduces’ it. First, we know that Brazilian textbooks cite a large amount of global North scholarship. Second, when observing textbook authors’ career paths, we note that all of them pursued professional careers in Brazil, even the ones that have strong connections to foreign institutions. When asked about who they consider to be their interlocutors, foreign individuals are mentioned as ‘mentors’ whereas other Brazilians are referred to as peers, with the exception of Rezek who mentions foreign international lawyers as part of his direct intellectual circle. This suggests that the careers of Brazilian international lawyers are mostly inward-looking and that local prestige is harnessed by studying in the global North and reproducing ideas learned there back home. 147 However, given the scope of our data that focuses on the citations in these textbooks and not to these textbooks in other (foreign) works, we cannot argue that this movement of ideas is completely unidirectional. We thus cannot make definitive claims about how ideas move between a ‘Brazilian branch’ of the invisible college of international lawyers and its ‘universal’ hub.

Whereas we recognize the inherent limitations of a study that uses a set of particular artefacts (textbooks) to make general statements about a field, we maintain that the results obtained here are relevant in at least three ways. First, they add complexity to ‘meta’ studies about international law as a discipline and a profession and shed light on the practice of an often overlooked semi-peripheral state. Second, this is a call to arms so that others take on this type of work, utilizing our methodology but also building upon it. Textbooks can help shine a light on the many hidden and otherwise hard-to-trace assumptions about how international law exists and operates. Finally, we hope our findings engage those writing textbooks in a conversation about their work’s power to shape the field and the responsibility that comes with textbooks’ discipline-making role. If we are serious about unveiling international legal contingency and advancing a better international law – in line with progressive agendas for the discipline – then textbooks offer a unique and important window to do just that.

Luíza Leão Soares Pereira, Guest Professor, School of Law Graduate Programme, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Email: [email protected].

Fabio Costa Morosini, Professor, School of Law, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; Research Fellow, National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology; Visiting Professor, University of Michigan Law School, USA. Email: [email protected]. The authors thank the following people: research assistants and members, Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology, Research Group Direito, Globalização e Desenvolvimento; Law librarian at the University of Michigan Law School, Shay Elbaum. For their helpful comments on earlier drafts, we would like to thank Arnulf Becker Lorca, George Rodrigo Bandeira Galindo and Lucas Lixinski.

Bernardino, ‘Going By the Book: What International Law Textbooks Teach Us Not to Know’, in A. Bianchi and M. Hirsch (eds), International Law’s Invisible Frames: Social Cognition and Knowledge Production in International Legal Processes (2021) 293.

P. Bourdieu, ‘The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field’, 38 Hastings Law Journal (1971) 805; Dezalay and Madsen, ‘The Force of Law and Lawyers: Pierre Bourdieu and the Reflexive Sociology of Law’, 8 Annual Review of Law and Social Science ( ARLSS ) (2012) 433; Dezalay and Dezalay, ‘Professionals of International Justice: From the Shadow of State Diplomacy to the Pull of the Market for Commercial Arbitration’, in J. d’Aspremont et al. (ed), International Law as a Profession (2017) 311; B. Latour, The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil D’Etat (2009).

Bianchi and Hirsch, ‘Introduction’, in Bianchi and Hirsch, supra note 1, 1.

Bernardino, supra note 1; M. García-Salmones Rovira, The Project of Positivism in International Law (2013) 85; Kennedy, ‘The Last Treatise: Project and Person (Reflections on Martti Koskenniemi’s from Apology to Utopia)’, 7 German Law Journal ( GLJ ) (2006) 982; Becker Lorca, ‘International Law in Latin America or Latin American International Law? Rise, Fall, and Retrieval of a Tradition of Legal Thinking and Political Imagination’ 47 Harvard International Law Journal (2006) 283.

Obregón, ‘Peripheral Histories of International Law’, 15 ARLSS (2019) 437; A. Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933 (2014).

Eslava, ‘The Teaching of (Another) International Law: Critical Realism and the Question of Agency and Structure’, 54 The Law Teacher (2019) 368.

al Attar and Abdelkarim, ‘Decolonising the Curriculum in International Law: Entrapments in Praxis and Critical Thought’, Law and Critique (2021). There is a movement specifically on this topic being undertaken by a network of researchers in Latin America known as REDIAL (Repensando o Ensino do Direito Internacional na América Latina). In this sense, see A. Sanctis de Brito et al ., ‘Reflexões sobre o ensino do direito internacional no Brasil: a formação como jurista internacionalista entre a teoria e a prática’, in E. Prieto Ríos, P. Acosta-Alvarado and D. Rivas Ramírez (eds.), Repensar la educación en derecho internacional en América Latina: avances y discusiones en 2019 (2020) 3; Betancur-Restrepo and Prieto Ríos, ‘Educación del derecho internacional en Bogotá: un primer diagnóstico a partir de los programas de clase y su relación con las epistemologías de no conocimiento’, 39 Revista Derecho del Estado ( RDE ) (2017) 53; de Brito and Nasser, ‘Ensinar direito internacional no Brasil: panorama de uma prática e seus desafios’, 39 RDE (2017) 119; P. Acosta-Alvarado et al ., ‘Rethinking International Legal Education in Latin America: Exploring Some Obstacles of a Hegemonic Colonial Academic Model in Chile and Colombia’, in S. Xavier et al (eds.), Decolonizing Law: Indigenous, Third World and Settler Perspectives (2021) 114.

A. Roberts, Is International Law International? (2017).

B. Hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (2010); G. Bhambra, D. Gebrial and K. Nişancıoğlu, ‘Introduction: Decolonizing the University?’, in G. Bhambra, D. Gebrial and K. Nişancıoğlu, Decolonizing the University (2018) 1.

In this sense, John Gray makes an interesting analogy between maps and textbooks: ‘Maps do more than simply describe, they simultaneously seek to construct. The same could be said about textbooks. They too set out to map a terrain, but like all maps they are the result of decision making in which the interests, beliefs and values of the map-makers play an all-important role’. J.E. Gray, The Construction of English (2010), at 1.

L. Christian-Smith, ‘Texts and High Tech: Computers, Gender, and Book Publishing’, in L. Christian-Smith and M. Apple (eds), The Politics of the Textbook (1991) 50.

Universidade Federal de Goiás, ‘Brasil: o maior complexo industrial de produção de bacharéis em direito’, available at https://direito.ufg.br/n/815-brasil-o-maior-complexo-industrial-de-producao-de-bachareis-em-direito#:~:text=O%20Brasil%20tem%20mais%20faculdades .

Textbooks are often the only products proving the ‘existence’ of international law ‘in the hands’ of Brazilian students. They are most students’ only contact with the discipline, in view of the inaccessibility of the field as a practical area of law for most students in Brazil and the developing world.

Using insights from grounded theory, see B. Glaser and A. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory (2019).

Koskenniemi, ‘The Fate of Public International Law: Between Technique and Politics’, 70 Modern Law Review (2007) 1.

Schachter, ‘The Invisible College of International Lawyers’, 72(2) Northwestern University Law Review (1977) 217.

Alberto do Amaral Júnior holds a doctorate in law from the University of São Paulo (1991) and has been a professor of international law at the University of São Paulo since 1987. His first textbook was published in 2008, and the latest edition dates from 2015. We used the fifth edition (2015) for our analysis.

Carlos Roberto Husek holds a doctorate in law from the Catholic University of São Paulo (2004) where he has also taught international law since 1987. In addition to academia, Husek was a labour judge from 1988 to 2021. He currently practises law in São Paulo. His first textbook was published in 1995, and the latest edition dates from 2023. We used the 14th edition (2017) for our analysis.

Dominique Carreau, who holds a doctorate in law from the University of Paris, was a professor of international law at the University of Paris. Jahyr-Philippe Bichara has a doctorate in international law from the University of Paris (2004) and teaches international law at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. Bichara did all of his legal studies in France and wrote his doctorate under the supervision of Carreau. Upon starting to teach international law in Brazil, he translated into Portuguese and adapted to the Brazilian reality Carreau’s original international law textbook. Their first textbook was published in 2015, and the latest edition dates from 2021, when they switched publishing houses to Paris’ Pedone, which will potentially reach a larger audience, especially other lusophone readers outside of Brazil. We used the second edition (2017) for our analysis.

Francisco Rezek holds a doctorate in public international law from the University of Paris (1970) and a diploma in law (1979) from the University of Oxford. He was a professor of international and constitutional law at the University of Brasilia and professor at the Instituto Rio Branco (Diplomacy School) since its creation in 1976. He served as attorney general (1972–1983), Supreme Court justice (1983–1990, 1992–1997), president of the Superior Electoral Court (1989–1990) and Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1990–1992). From 1997 to 2006, he served as a judge at the International Court of Justice. He opened his own law practice in 2008. His first textbook was published in 1989, and the latest edition dates from 2022. We used the 17th edition (2018) for our analysis.

Hildebrando Accioly (1988–1962) was a high-profile career diplomat who taught international law at the Catholic University of São Paulo and the Instituto Rio Branco. The first edition of his textbook was published in 1948. In 1970, he joined forces with Geraldo Eulalio do Nascimento e Silva (1917–2003), another career diplomat. In 2007, by invitation of Nascimento e Silva, Paulo Borba Casella was added to the group and became the sole living author of this textbook. João Roriz, ‘Um Dever Do “Homem Culto”: Hildebrando Accioly, Jurista, Diplomata’, in G. Galindo (ed.), Direito Internacional no Brasil: Pensamento e Tradição (2021) 31, at 41. Casella is a full professor of public international law at the University of São Paulo. He has a doctorate in international law (1986) from the same university and a master of law from the University of Paris. The latest edition of this textbook dates from 2023. We used the 20th edition (2012) for our analysis.

Marcelo Dias Varella holds a doctorate in law (2002) from the University of Paris and has been teaching international law at the University Centre of Brasilia since 2002. Since 2005, he has been a research fellow at the Ministry of Science and Technology of Brazil, conducting independent research. In addition to academia, since 2006, Varella has been a career public official in Brazil’s Federal Executive, having acted as a consultant in law and public policy in several Ministries. His first textbook was published in 2008, and the latest edition dates from 2019. We used the sixth edition (2016) for our analysis.

Salem Nasser holds a doctorate in international law from the University of São Paulo (2004) and a master’s degree in international law from the University of Paris. Since 2004, Salem has taught international law at FGV São Paulo School of Law. We used the first and single edition of his textbook (2012) for our analysis.

Sidney Guerra is a full professor of public international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, full professor of law at the University of Grande Rio and professor of the graduate programme in law at the University Candido Mendes. He holds a doctorate in law from the University Gama Filho (2002). In addition to academia, Guerra practises law in Rio de Janeiro. His first textbook was published in 2004, and the latest edition dates from 2023. We used the 12th edition (2019) for our analysis.

Valerio Mazzuoli holds a doctorate in law from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (2008). Since 2008, Mazzuoli has been teaching international law at the Federal University of Mato Grosso. In addition to his role in academia, he is a practising lawyer in Cuiaba, Mato Grosso. His first textbook was published in 2006, and the latest edition dates from 2023. We used the 13th edition (2020) for our analysis.

Celso Duvivier de Albuquerque Mello held a Bachelor of Laws from the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. He taught international law at several law schools in the state of Rio de Janeiro, including the most prestigious ones: the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the State University of Rio de Janeiro until his passing in 2005. Between 1973 and 1976, he taught international law at the Ministry of Foreign Relations before the creation of the Instituto Rio Branco. In addition to being a professor, Mello served as a judge (1966–1992) and president of the Maritime Tribunal, an autonomous body linked to the Marines (1980–1981). His first textbook was published in 1967, and the latest edition dates from 2007. We used the 12th edition (2000) and vol. 2 of the 14th edition (2002) for our analysis. Morosini and Leichtweis, ‘Um TWAILer Entre Nós? Desvendando as Contribuições de Celso Duvivier de Albuquerque Mello Para O Direito Internacional (Crítico) No Brasil’, 17 Brazilian Journal of International Law ( BJIL ) (2020) 199, at 202–204.

Similarly to Roberts, ‘[relying] on academics, academic publishers, and students’ (from her chosen jurisdictions) when conducting her study of textbooks. Roberts, supra note 8, at 130.

For an appraisal of this treatise, see J. Roriz, ‘Um Tratado Brasileiro’, 7 May 2022, available at http://ila-brasil.org.br/blog/um-tratado-brasileiro/ .

As is suggested in the title to Reisman, ‘Lassa Oppenheim’s Nine Lives’, 19 Yale Journal of International Law (1994) 255.

Though here we analysed its 25th edition.

Becker Lorca, supra note 4, at 287.

G.M.C.M. Russomano, Direito Internacional Público (1989). On Russomano’s influence on Brazilian international law, see L.S. Tasquetto, ‘A “inabalável confiança no Direito Internacional contemporâneo” e a dubiedade em suas abordagens: a trajetória acadêmica e profissional de Gilda Maciel Corrêa Meyer Russomano’, in G. R. B. Galindo (ed.) Direito Internacional no Brasil: Pensamento e Tradição (2021) 301, at 301.

D. Ventura and R. Seitenfus, Direito Internacional Público (2006).

An updated edition of Ventura’s book was re-edited in 2016 without her as a co-author.

That is, the official Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development Curricula and other available sources.

F.C. Morosini and L.L.S. Pereira, ‘Research Symposium: Direito Internacional na “Palma da Mão”: lendo as (entre)linhas dos manuais brasileiros’, International Law Association Brazil (2021), available at http://ila-brasil.org.br/blog/direito-internacional-na-palma-da-mao-lendo-as-entrelinhas-dos-manuais-brasileiros/ ; F.C. Morosini and L.L.S. Pereira, ‘Research Symposium: International Law “in the Palm of Our Hand”: Reading between the Lines of Brazilian International Law Textbooks’, Afronomics (2021), available at www.afronomicslaw.org/category/analysis/research-symposium-international-law-palm-our-hand-reading-between-lines .

To design our questionnaire, we were informed by M. Rocha Machado, Pesquisar Empiricamente o Direito (2017).

Manza and Wright, ‘Producing Textbook Sociology’, 51 Archives Europeennes de Sociologie (2010) 271.

Y. Giraud, ‘Textbooks in the Historiography of Recent Economics’, in T. Dupe and E.R. Weintraub (eds), A Contemporary Historiography of Economics (2019) 137; Richardson, ‘Reading and Writing from Textbooks in Higher Education: A Case Study from Economics’, 29 Studies in Higher Education (2004) 505.

Ferguson et al ., ‘Constructing Meaning in the Service of Power: An Analysis of the Typical Modes of Ideology in Accounting Textbooks’, 20 Critical Perspectives on Accounting (2009) 896.

Vitta, ‘The Functions and Features of ELT Textbooks and Textbook Analysis: A Concise Review’, Regional Language Centre Journal (2021) 1; Babaii and Sheikhi, ‘Traces of Neoliberalism in English Teaching Materials: A Critical Discourse Analysis’, 15 Critical Discourse Studies (2018) 247.

A. Lundgren and B. Bensaude-Vincent (eds), Communicating Chemistry: Textbooks and Their Audiences, 1789–1939 (2000); M. Badino and J. Navarro (eds), Research Pedagogy: A History of Quantum Physics through Its Textbooks (2017).

Issitt, ‘Reflections on the Study of Textbooks’, 33 History of Education (2004) 683, at 684.

Christian-Smith and Apple, ‘The Politics of the Textbook’, in Christian-Smith and Apple, supra note 11, 1, at 2–3.

Tobias, ‘Gender Issues and the Prosser, Wade, and Schwartz Torts Casebook’, 18 Golden Gate University Law Review (1988) 495.

Frug, ‘Re-Reading Contracts: A Feminist Analysis of a Contracts Casebook’, 34 American University Law Review ( AULR ) (1985) 1065.

Grosso and O’Brien, ‘Grounding Criminal Procedure’, 20 Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice (2017) 53; Ristroph, ‘The Curriculum of the Carceral State’, 120 Columbia Law Review (2020) 1631.

Lind, ‘An Economic Analysis of Early Casebook Publishing’, 96 Law Library Journal (2004) 95.

D. Sugarman, ‘Legal Theory, the Common Law Mind and the Making of the Textbook Tradition’, in W. Twining (ed.), Legal Theory and Common Law (1986) 26; Cownie, ‘Are We Witnessing the Death of the Textbook Tradition in the UK?’, 3 European Journal of Legal Education (2006) 79.

A. Carty, ‘19th Century Textbooks and International Law’ (1972) (PhD dissertation on file at the University of Cambridge), at iii, ix.

Ibid. , at xxiv.

Kennedy, ‘The Last Treatise: Project and Person (Reflections on Martti Koskenniemi’s from Apology to Utopia)’, 7 GLJ (2006) 982; Koskenniemi, ‘Book Review of Brownlie’s Principles of Public International Law’, 83 BYIL (2014) 137.

L. Oppenheim, International Law: A Treatise (3rd edn, 1920).

Schmoeckel, ‘The Internationalist as a Scientist and Herald: Lassa Oppenheim’, 11 European Journal of International Law ( EJIL ) (2000) 699, at 701.

Kingsbury, ‘Legal Positivism as Normative Politics: International Society, Balance of Power and Lassa Oppenheim’s Positive International Law’, 13 EJIL (2002) 401, at 412.

Becker Lorca, supra note 32, at 287.

Ibid. , at 287–293.

Bernardino, supra note 1, 293.

Ibid. , at 6 (emphasis in the original).

Ibid. , at 8.

Ibid. , at 9.

Ibid. , at 11.

Ibid. , at 12.

H. Jones and A. O’Donoghue, History and Self-Reflection in the Teaching of International Law (2022).

Ibid. , at 88–93.

Ibid. , at 91–92.

Ibid. , at 92.

Roberts, supra note 8.

A. Roberts et al., ‘Conceptualizing Comparative International Law’, in A. Roberts et al. (eds), Comparative International Law (2018) 3.

Roberts, supra note 8, at 32.

Ibid. , at 33 (emphasis added).

Ibid. , at 34.

Ibid. , at 135–138.

Ibid. , at 35.

Hernández, ‘E Pluribus Unum? A Divisible College?: Reflections on the International Legal Profession’, 29 EJIL (2018) 1003; see also Chasapis Tassinis, ‘The Self-seeing Soul and Comparative International Law: Reading Anthea Roberts’ Is International Law International?’, 7 Cambridge International Law Journal (2018) 420.

For our elaboration on these findings, see section 4.B.

See section 5.C.

Jones and O’Donoghue, supra note 71.

See section 5.A.

Interviewer: ‘[D]o you think your manual, based on the description you’re providing here, could be used in other parts of the world? We were talking about Brazil, but do you think?’

Interviewee no. 7: ‘I think so, without any problem, because it has this concrete aspect. Of course, you can change the materials, you can refine the questions, you can..., but I believe it can be used easily. Especially because, as you know, in our course, we have two-thirds of public and one-third of private students. However, the manual specifically refers only to public international law. So, when it comes to the private part, it becomes very Brazil-specific, as Brazil deals with private international matters. Therefore, I think, um, except maybe for the aspects related to the relationship between international and domestic law, which are very specific to Brazil in a manual, how Brazil deals with the internalization and hierarchy of international treaties, you would have to modify that and generalize a bit more. Although I always start with the observation that when you look at this relationship, you no longer approach it from the perspective of international law. Instead, you primarily consider it from the perspective of domestic law, and each legal system establishes its own relationship with international law. But apart from that, I think it is fully usable, although, as I mentioned, it needs to be updated and, um, more sophisticated. I would like to change the case studies, you know, just to freshen them up. But the experience also shows, at least in a course like ours, which is relatively short and has this division with the private aspect, you can’t cover the entire course. I end up leaving aside, at least, one chapter or one of the major topics, for example, like the elements of the state, the state as a subject of international law. Because the number of weeks is limited, you can’t go as deep as you would like.’

Interviewer: ‘No, I will, … if you want to continue, just interrupt me as well, okay? We have seen a concern, not only in Brazil but also elsewhere, regarding the idea of trying to identify unique characteristics of international law that are related to the place where it is produced. The question would be whether you believe there are Brazilian elements in international law, and if so, what would these elements be that could give, let’s say, a "tropicalization" to international law?’

Interviewee no. 7: ‘Well, I think, … I’m aware of this debate, even though I haven’t been following it closely. I’m also very curious about it. Right now, maybe I haven’t delved too deeply into it because I tend to be a bit skeptical about this diversity of international law. I think as a language, you know, international law is very much produced in Europe. And I believe this even manifests itself in our manuals and such. We could copy a manual from any other country, say, a French manual, and translate it into Portuguese, and maybe no one would notice. So, you wouldn’t need to invent anything. And I don’t see, even among the Brazilian professors I’ve come across, anything that is significantly different.’

Interviewee no. 1: ‘I believe there is a Brazilian perspective on international law and international relations, but not a Brazilian international law per se. I can’t identify an international law founded on a Brazilian perspective. Perhaps today we can observe elements that could lead us to the idea of an international law from a Brazilian perspective, but these elements are still dispersed and do not yet allow for a deeper consolidation to the extent that we can qualify them as an international law from a Brazilian perspective.’

Interviewee no. 3: ‘I intentionally don’t mention many things. So sometimes I read something somewhere, but why wouldn’t it be plagiarism? Because everyone says the same thing. So I could say, “Treaty is a genus of which convention is a species,” but everyone says that. So my sources go beyond those that I cite. I only cite what I can’t find anywhere else, what I see is not obvious. And when I do cite these... Shawn, Brownlie, Pellet, Daillier, Dupuy, the others that I mention, it’s because I only found that in them. Now, undoubtedly, since I studied in the United States... I mean... I studied in France and England, before the manual, there will be more French authors, you know. But perhaps, if you pay attention, you’ll see that a large part of my citations is case law. Why? Because there’s no way to avoid citing that. The idea is that the manual doesn’t have many footnotes. Now, the manual, in my view, is not a scientific work where you need to... if I were doing academic research or writing a scientific article to create a book like this, I would need... even in the final version, I would have thousands and thousands of citations, but then the sauce would cost more than the chicken, you know. For example, in the early versions of my manual, you can see an index of cases. But as I expanded the manual, I eliminated it.’

Interviewee no. 4: ‘What initially inspired us to write the book – this course that we have, which is now in its 16th edition – were products of the classes themselves, so that the students could understand what we were trying to convey. This is a first point: to pass on to the students a theoretical, well-grounded understanding. Although there are many good books on international law – obviously, right? – and many good authors in Brazil and around the world, the truth is that we had a particular view of the subject as we studied each author, as every professor does. This particular view of the subject regarding the fundamentals of international law, things that we considered important to include in the book – which not all books had, nor all courses had. … A student of international law, when hearing about international law for the first time, thinks that we will be discussing international politics. Politics... international law doesn’t exist.... Convincing the student that international law is law and that it exists is what concerned us when writing the book, saying: “Look, there is a legal division of the world, the world is divided, the sea has divisions, there’s territorial waters, contiguous zones, considerations of contiguous and successive rivers, there is state sovereignty, the state is part of the international society, if it weren’t, we would be in a permanent state of war, maybe the world wouldn’t exist”. We focused a lot on diplomacy, including some specific chapters that we didn’t see in other courses, such as the international organization of labor, right? With each edition, we add something new: International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, and so on.... It’s a worldview for the law student, saying that obviously politics is there, social facts are there, but law encompasses everything, law is our salvation. That was the idea, and since the first book – which had about 150 pages – we have reached the current edition with a book of 400 pages. And it’s still too little, you know?! My idea – and I’m working towards it – is to create something more extensive, perhaps two or three volumes, but I need time, and we’ll gradually finish these things.’

See section 5.C.2.

Roberts, supra note 8, at 130.

Ibid. , at 137.

G. Bhambra, D. Gebrial and K. Nişancıoğlu, ‘Introduction: Decolonizing the University?’, in G. Bhambra, D. Gebrial and K. Nişancıoğlu (eds), Decolonizing the University (2018) 1; A. Escobar, ‘Mundos Y Conocimientos de Otro Modo: El Programa de Investigación de Modernidad/Colonialidad Latinoamericano’, Tabula Rasa (2003) 51.

Arnulf Becker Lorca, in particular, made such a comment when invited to discuss our article in a seminar held online at the University of Sheffield’s Early Career Work in Progress Seminar in the United Kingdom on 18 May 2022.

Interviewer: ‘And your manual cites a lot of Brazilians, right? And that is something you consider important in the notion and formation of international law... right?’ Interviewee no. 2: ‘I think so because, well, you also had opportunities during your academic formation to study abroad, to travel a lot, like I did. And I find it very complicated, you know when people here in Brazil sometimes arrive speaking another language, whatever it may be, French, English, Spanish, anything, they are already revered as something impressive. Even in some other studies, like for example, the discussion of Latin American constitutionalism here in Rio de Janeiro, there is even a program that discusses that, but the one bringing up that discussion is not even Latin American, it’s a European. So, you can see how things are. I believe that here in Brazil, and I have said this in various places I go, even outside of Brazil, not now, but hopefully soon we can travel again, is that in Brazil and in Latin America in general, there is still a lot of this need for European formation, the recommendation of European authors, and sometimes we fail to make recommendations, citations, to give recognition to our colleagues who are right here, close by, in Rio Grande do Sul, in São Paulo, in Roraima. So, I see this in a very negative way, in terms of my desire, and it’s what I have sought to do, always valuing those who deserve to be valued, naturally, not only in intellectual terms but also in personal, moral terms, because there are also people who, well, it’s not worth it, you know, to value friends here in Brazil, regardless of having many friends, thank God, outside of Brazil, and having travelled extensively. But I think the spotlight, um, needs to be given to those who are from here, you know, if it’s a very specific topic, then okay, you can’t bring that discussion, but if you are a pioneer, if you are the reference, why not? So, for example, when it comes to human rights, you cannot ignore studying Cançado Trindade, you just can’t. So, “Oh, so I’m going to look for another author just so I don’t use Cançado Trindade?” Some people do that, but I’m not going to do that.’

Under the ‘others’ category, we found mostly an aggregate of authors from other European countries (for example, Germany, Austria, Belgium) and a few from Canada. There was a small number of Latin American authors cited (Uruguayan, Argentinian, Mexican, Peruvian) and a few Russian and Polish authors. None of these numbers, however, were sufficiently significant to be included as a stand-alone category in this graph.

Some of the universalist/particularist tendencies are identified throughout the text but are expounded upon here.

Becker Lorca, supra note 4.

Ibid. , at 287.

Morosini and Leichtweis, supra note 26, at 209–211.

Roberts herself suspects that this might be the case. See Roberts, supra note 8, at 152–156.

See section 4.A.

Fagbayibo, ‘Some Thoughts on Centring Pan-African Epistemic in the Teaching of Public International Law in African Universities’, 21 International Community Law Review (2019) 170.

Koskenniemi, supra note 15, at 29.

Roriz, supra note 21, at 31. Accioly’s conservatism and catholicism influenced his ideas, as observed by Roriz and Pereira, ‘Um Internacionalista Atravessado: Hildebrando Accioly e a Grande Imprensa (1944–52)’ (2022) (Monograph thesis on file at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre).

H. Accioly, Tratado de direito internacional público , 3 vols (1933–1935) (author’s translation).

K.L.G. Pinto, ‘Noblesse d’État: Do Campo Ao Habitus Da Diplomacia Brasileira’ (2016) (PhD thesis on file at Universidade Estadual de Campinas), available at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26849997 .

C.D. de Albuquerque Mello, Curso de Direito Internacional Público (12th edn, 2000), at 15.

F. Morosini and M.G. Leichtweis, ‘Um TWAILER entre nós? Desvendando as contribuições de Celso Duvivier de Albuquerque Mello para o direito internacional (crítico) no Brasil’, in G. Galindo (ed.), Direito Internacional no Brasil: Pensamento e Tradição (2021) 377, at 383.

On the New International Economic Order and Latin America, see J. Castañeda (ed.), Derecho Económico Internacional: análisis jurídico de la Carta de Derechos y Deberes Económicos de los Estados (1976); H. Gros Espiell, Derecho Internacional del Desarrollo (1975).

Morosini and Leichtweis, supra note 26, at 220.

J. F. Rezek, História Oral Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil, Entrevista José Francisco Rezek I available at www18.fgv.br/CPDOC/acervo/historia-oral/entrevista-tematica/jose-francisco-rezek-i .

The offer of international relations courses has been developing steadily in Brazil and, alongside it, the need for materials that teach international law to this different audience. Vigevani, Thomaz and Leite, ‘As Relações Internacionais no Brasil: notas sobre o início de sua institucionalização’, 14 Inter-Relações (2014) 5; Lessa, ‘Instituições, atores e dinâmicas do ensino e da pesquisa em Relações Internacionais no Brasil: o diálogo entre a história, a ciência política e os novos paradigmas de interpretação (dos anos 90 aos nossos dias)’, 48 Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional (2005) 169.

In addition to his textbook, Amaral Júnior was commissioned by the Instituto Rio Branco’s Fundação Alexandre de Gusmão, from 1996 to 2012, to produce four editions of the Candidate’s Manual , a horn-book containing general guidelines on law generally and on international law for those wishing to take the Rio Branco exam. See A. do Amaral Junior, Manual do Candidato: Noções de Direito e Direito Internacional (2012).

Although we recognize that British academia is made up of many non-British scholars.

Interviewee no. 2: ‘My textbook is different because... I am very... objective, sometimes people take a paragraph to explain what you can explain in a paragraph, it takes 10 pages. Just to show off a presumed erudition many times, right? And as for me... I... I value my space, my work, my time, and I try to do the same in relation to other people. So if we were to use a vulgar terminology, then there are many books that people write, write, write just to fill the pages, well... they use various aspects to make the material have a larger body. And I try to be direct, be objective, I try to indicate new theories, as I have already mentioned here, not only in the field of catastrophes, but mainly in the fields where I have been more active, the issue involving human rights and the environment, and the subjects that are already recurrent, which are addressed here in Brazil and in the world, I try to approach them in a very objective manner.’

Fundação Getúlio Vargas / Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil, Exame Da Ordem Em Números (2020).

Portaria no. 1.886/94, Resolução CNE/CES no. 9/2004; see also Saliba, ‘Direito Internacional No Brasil’, in M. Sanchez-Badin, A. De Brito and D. Ventura (eds), Direito global e suas alternativas metodológicas: primeiros passos (2016) 131.

C.R. Husek, Curso de Direito Internacional Público (2017), at 9; V.O. Mazzuoli, Curso de Direito Internacional Público (2023), at 9.

Engelmann, Menuzzi and Pilau, ‘International Connections within the National Government: Brazilian Public Legal Careers and International Circulation (2008–2018)’, 79 Crime, Law and Social Change (2023) 627. This seems to be in line with the global trend of ‘transnationalized bureaucracy’ described by Wilkins, ‘Making Global Lawyers: Legal Practice, Legal Education, and the Paradox of Professional Distinctiveness’, 26 Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession Research Paper (2014) 4.

Interviewee no. 3: ‘Well... I think there’s a bit of everything, you know. First, there has always been international law in exams, like the bar exam, for positions such as police officer, prosecutor, attorney, judge and here in Brasília, consultant for the Chamber and Senate, the two most prestigious exams. In the military police here in Brasília, it always comes up because of the embassies, and in the civil police, because officers constantly encounter diplomatic and consular units in their daily work. They stop someone, and if the person makes a mistake, they need to know what to do, you know. In my book, I even try to address that, but in my... I won’t lie, there are some things in my book that I included from the beginning thinking about that because in Brasília, the life of Brasilienses revolves around taking exams. So, for example, what commonly appears in exams, I highlight in bold, and I provide a summary at the end of each chapter.’

Except with the highly prestigious entrance exam for the Instituto Rio Branco, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs diplomatic academy.

Koskenniemi, supra note 15.

Three of the authors were exclusively academics: Amaral Júnior, Bichara and Casella.

On the international bar, see Kumar and Rose, ‘A Study of Lawyers Appearing before the International Court of Justice, 1999–2012’, 25 EJIL (2014) 893. On the absence of global South scholars in the high echelons of the profession, see Pereira and Ridi, ‘Mapping the “Invisible College of International Lawyers” through Obituaries’, 34 Leiden Journal of International Law (2020) 67. On the relationship between local elites and global North jurisconsultes , see Dezalay and Dezalay, supra note 2.

Morosini and Leichtweis, supra note 26.

Christian-Smith and Apple, supra note 45, at 3.

On the relationship between gender and international law, see Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright, ‘Feminist Approaches to International Law’, 85 American Journal of International Law (1991) 613. On racial biases and international law, see Mutua, ‘Critical Race Theory and International Law: Convergence and Divergence’, 45 Villanova Law Review (2000) 827.

On how racism impacts on the interpretation and application of the law in Brazil, see J.A. Moreira, Pensando como um Negro: Ensaio de Hermeneutica Juridica (2019); see also Engle and Lixinski, ‘Quilombo Land Rights, Brazilian Constitutionalism, and Racial Capitalism’, 54 Vanderbilt Law Review (2023) 831.

Lang and Marks, ‘People with Projects: Writing the Lives of International Lawyers’, 27 Temple International and Comparative Law Journal (2013) 437, at 444.

On the French influence in other areas of Brazilian law, see Junqueira de Azevedo, ‘Influência Do Direito Francês Sobre o Direito Brasileiro’, 89 Revista da Faculdade de Direito, Universidade de São Paulo (1994) 183.

See sections 5.C.1, 5.C.2 and 5.C.4.

We identify that, in the Brazilian experience, France and The Hague are part of what James Gathii identifies as the ‘the limited geography of places and ideas that dominate the beltway of our discipline’. Gathii, ‘The Promise of International Law: A Third World View’, 36 AULR (2021) 378.

Bernardino, supra note 1.

See, e.g., Jones and O’Donoghue, ‘History and Self-Reflection in the Teaching of International Law’, 10 London Review of International Law (2022) 71.

See Ainsworth, ‘Case for Casebook Reviews’, 20 Seattle University Law Review (1997) 271, at 275 (stating that ‘Watson and DeLong both note the striking absence from their reviewed casebooks of issues involving race, class, gender, and sexuality, not only omitting and effacing such factors from the cases and problems but also neglecting to include jurisprudential voices such as critical race and feminist theory among the scholarly perspectives to which students are exposed’).

A. Reis de Araujo, ‘Como é possível haver preconceito racial em um país com a maior população negra do mundo fora do continente africano?’, MPT 2ª Região , available at www.prt2.mpt.mp.br/512-como-e-possivel-haver-preconceito-racial-em-um-pais-com-a-maior-populacao-negra-do-mundo-fora-do-continente-africano#:~:text=A%20normativa%20internacional%20tem%20especial .

A. de Sanctis, ‘Seeking Capture, Resisting Seizure: Legal Battles under the Anglo-Brazilian Treaty for the Suppression of the Slave Trade (1826–1845) (2020) (PhD thesis on file at Universidade de São Paulo), available at www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/2/2139/tde-30102020-143337/en.php ); R. Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of Slave Trade (2012).

IACtHR, Gomes Lund et al. v. Brazil , Judgment (Preliminary Objection, Merits, Reparations, and Costs), 27 November 2010. All decisions are available at www.corteidh.or.cr/index.php/en/jurisprudencia .

Brasil, Lei no. 11.340, 7 August 2006.

IACtHR, Maria da Penha Fernandes v. Brazil , Judgment (Preliminary Objection, Merits, Reparations, and Costs), 13 March 2001.

Abortion rights, trans rights and the criminalization of homosexuality are all under the purview of regional human rights courts and United Nations human rights treaty bodies. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women 1979, 1249 UNTS 13; United Nations Human Rights Committee, Toonen v. Australia , 31 March 1994; IACtHR, Atala Riffo et al. v. Chile , Judgment (Merits, Reparations and Costs), 24 February 2012.

See the statement from Interviewee no. 2, supra note 99, at 21 (about being revered for studying abroad and having foreign connections, particularly European).

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

Online ISSN 1464-3596
Print ISSN 0938-5428
Copyright © 2024 EJIL
About Oxford Academic
Publish journals with us
University press partners
What we publish
New features
Open access
Institutional account management
Rights and permissions
Get help with access
Accessibility
Advertising
Media enquiries
Oxford University Press
Oxford Languages
University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
Cookie settings
Cookie policy
Privacy policy
Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

30 Important Case Laws/ Judgements on RTI

Written by Sushmita Mishra

Updated on: April 15, 2024

Table of Contents

30 Important Case Law/ Judgements on RTI OR Information Law

Information law/ RTI is one of the important laws applicable in India. All are have a right to information. Now there is modern technology to acquire information to be collected, stored, used, analyzed. To protect the right of individuals of information there are various laws. The one of them is Right to Information Act, 2000. The Act is established to protect the right to get information of the individuals. The information law governs the extent to the citizens to access the information from the Central Government and other public authorities. The information law is guard to protect from misuse of private and confidential information by the public authorities, employers, media and others. The information law has its scope in other fields of legal practices such as environmental law, public law, employment law and business law.

Also Read: CPIO, Supreme Court v. Subhash Chandra Agarwal

Now the information related to the government and other public authorities are also available online on their portal. We can get information anywhere anytime by using their portal. There is also law which deals with networking information that is Information Technology Act. The right to information is the fundamental right of the individuals. In this topic there are various judgments. In this article we will focus on top 30 important case laws relating information law.

Central Public Information Officer, Supreme Court of India vs. Subhash Chandra Agarwal , 2020

Facts of the case.

In this case, three appeals were filed which arises from three different Applications filed by respondent, Subhash Chandra Agarwal before Central Public Information Officer (CPIO), Supreme Court.

Apex Court dismissed the appeal and upheld the Delhi High Court judgment by directing the Central Public Information Officer, Supreme Court to furnish information regarding collegium decision-making, personal assets of judges, correspondence with CJI. No general decision came up relating to the universal disclosure of above-mentioned information.

Also held RTI Applicable To Office Of CJI

UPSC v. Angesh Kumar, AIR 2018

Facts of the case.

Some unsuccessful candidates in the Civil Services (Preliminary) Examination, 2010 approached the High Court for a direction to the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) to disclose the details of the marks (raw and scaled) awarded to them in Civil Service (Prelims) Examination, 2010. The information in the form of cut-off marks for every subject, scaling methodology, model answers and complete results of all candidates were also sought.

The Court read the inherent limitation in Sections 3 and 6 as pertaining to revelation of information that is likely to conflict with other public interests including efficient operations of the Governments, optimum use of limited fiscal resources and the preservation of confidentiality of sensitive information. UPSC was accordingly directed to disclose the raw marks as well as the model answers of the questions in the examination. The Supreme Court referred to the problems in showing evaluated answers sheets in the UPSC Civil Services Examination in Prashant Ramesh Chakkarwar v. UPSC, 2013.

N N Dhumane v. PIO, Department of Post, 2018

The order of CIC in the instant case is a remarkable one as it condemns the act of Department of Posts in denying payment of pension for want of Aadhaar Card. Other key observation made by the CIC in the case was that payment of pension is a matter of life or liberty under the RTI Act and applications relating to payment of Pension shall be disposed by the Public Information Officers within 48 hours. The Aadhaar card is required for pension has already provided under the RTI Act 2005 as per the Section 8 (1) (j) of the RTI Act 2005, information which relates to personal information the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or which would cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of an individual. The SSP Ahmednagar has not furnished the names of 55 pensioners and he has taken shelter of provisions of Section 8 (1)(j) of the RTI Act. The furnishing names of 55 pensioners does not amount to right to privacy. It is open fact and withholding the names 55 pensioners is a breach of RTI Act 2005.

Judgment The Court held that citizens cannot be forced to produce their Aadhaar card to receive government welfare scheme benefits. This Court had further clarified that such a compulsion couldn’t be made since that was in contravention of the citizens’ fundamental rights. Pension payment cannot be denied for want of Aadhaar card.

Union of India v. Chief Information Commissioner, 2017

The petitioner in the case has challenged the order of CIC, whereby the CIC declared, “the Ministers in the Union Government and all State Governments as ‘public authorities’ under section 2(h) of RTI Act, 2005.

The Delhi High Court set aside the order of CIC and was the opinion that the directions issued by the CIC in the case was beyond the scope of CIC. Moreover the question need not arise at all in the first instance itself.

The Registrar, Supreme Court v. R S Mishra, 2017

Fact of the case

In April 2010, a former schoolteacher, R.S. Misra, filed an RTI request with the Supreme Court Registry. He had earlier sent two letters to different Justices, essentially demanding redress in a case before the apex court that he had already lost. In an evident attempt at using RTI to fight a judicial battle already lost, he sought “action taken” reports on his letters. The Registry could have lawfully disposed of this RTI request by simply stating that no such information was available. Instead, the Registry rejected the application, and asked Mr. Mishra to apply under the Supreme Court Rules. Mr. Mishra challenged this response before the then Central Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi.

At issue was the right of citizens to get information from the Supreme Court , and by implication, India’s higher judiciary, which has strongly resisted the RTI. The apex court summarily rejects RTI requests, and insists that applicants exclusively request information under its administrative rules (Supreme Court Rules) framed in 1966, and re-issued with minor changes in 2014. To see why the High Court’s judgment strengthens a culture of opacity in the higher judiciary, we need to delve into the Supreme Court’s engagement, or rather persistent non-engagement with the RTI.

Reserve Bank of India v. Jayantilal Mistry (Supreme Court, 2015)

In this case, the interesting issue that was raised was whether all the information sought for under the Right to Information Act, 2005 can be denied by the Reserve Bank of India and other Banks to the public at large on the ground of economic interest, commercial confidence, fiduciary relationship with other Bank on the one hand and the public interest on the other?

The RBI in the case took the stand that the information sought for was exempted under Section 8(1) (a), (d) and (e) of the Right to Information Act, 2005. Moreover, as the regulator and supervisor of the banking system, the RBI has discretion in the disclosure of such information in public interest. While allowing the appeal the Supreme Court in the case held that in the case the RBI does not place itself in a fiduciary relationship with the Financial institutions because, the reports of the inspections, statements of the bank, information related to the business obtained by the RBI are not under the pretext of confidence or trust. In this case neither the RBI nor the Banks act in the interest of each other.

Adesh Kumar v. Union of India (Delhi High Court), 2014

In the case, the Petitioner was aggrieved by denial of information under the RTI Act by the concerned Public Information Officer in the case. FIR had been lodged against the Petitioner during his tenure of service and subsequently, a charge sheet, against the petitioner was submitted. On receipt of charge sheet, the Petitioner applied for information under the RTI Act pertaining to sanction of prosecution against him.

However, the requested information was rejected by the CPIO claiming that there was no obligation to provide the same by virtue of Section 8(1)(h) of the RTI Act.

The scheme of the RTI Act, its objects and reasons indicate that disclosure of information is the rule and non-disclosure the exception. A public authority which seeks to withhold information available with it has to show that the information sought is of the nature specified in Section 8 RTI Act. The burden is on the public authority to show in what manner the disclosure of such information would ‘impede’ the investigation. Merely, citing that the information is exempted under Section 8(1)(h) of the Act would not absolve the public authority from discharging its onus as required to claim such exemption. whether the information sought by the petitioner is relevant or necessary, is not relevant or germane in the context of the Act; a citizen has a right to information by virtue of Section 3 of the Act and the same is not conditional on the information being relevant.

CBSE Vs. Aditya Bandopadhyay (2011) 8 SCC 497.

Fact of case Whether an examinee’s (Students) right to information under the RTI Act includes a right to inspect his evaluated answer books in a public examination and taking certified copies of the same. The examining body,-CBSE,- had claimed that it held the information in a fiduciary relationship and hence this was exempt under Section 8 (1) (e) of the RTI Act.

Section 22 of RTI Act provides that the provisions of the said Act will have effect, notwithstanding anything inconsistent therewith contained in any other law for the time in force. Therefore the provisions of the RTI Act will prevail over the provisions of the bye-laws/rules of the examining bodies in regard to examinations. As a result, unless the examining body is able to demonstrate that the answer-books fall under the exempted category of information described in clause (e) of section 8(1) of RTI Act, the examining body will be bound to provide access to an examinee to inspect and take copies of his evaluated answer-books, even if such inspection or taking copies is barred under the rules/bye-laws of the examining body governing the examinations. It cannot, therefore, be said that the examining body is in a fiduciary relationship either with reference to the examinee who participates in the examination and whose answer-books are evaluated by the examining body. The Court ruled that corrected answer sheets were information which should be provided to students who seek them under RTI.

Girish Ramchandra Deshpande v. Chief Information Commissioner and ors., 2013 Facts of the case Whether the information pertaining to a Public Servant in respect of his service career and also the details of his assets and liabilities, movable and immovable properties, can be denied on the ground that the information sought for was qualified to be personal information as defined in clause (j) of Section 8(1) of the RTI Act. Judgment The details disclosed by a person in his income tax returns are “personal information” which stand exempted from disclosure under clause (j) of Section 8(1) of the RTI Act, unless involves a larger public interest and the Central Public Information Officer or the State Public Information Officer or the Appellate Authority is satisfied that the larger public interest justifies the disclosure of such information.” The Apex Court held that copies of all memos, show cause notices and orders of censure/punishment, assets, income tax returns, details of gifts received etc. by a public servant are personal information as defined in clause (j) of Section 8(1) of the RTI Act and hence exempted and cannot be furnished under RTI Act.

R.K. Jain Vs. Union of India JT 2013

Facts of the case The information requested was an inspection of adverse confidential remarks against ‘integrity’ of a member of Tribunal and follow up actions taken on issue of integrity. Exemption was claimed on the basis of Section 8 (1) (j).

Inter alia relying upon the ruling made in Girish Ramchandra Deshpande case, the information is exempted from disclosure under Section 8 (1) (j). read with section 11 of the RTI Act. Under Section 11(1), if the information relates to or has been supplied by a third party and has been treated as confidential by the third party, and if the Central Public Information Officer or a State Public Information Officer intends to disclose any such information or record on a request made under the Act, in such case after written notice to the third party of the request, the Officer may disclose the information, if the third party agrees to such request or if the public interest in disclosure outweighs in importance any possible harm or injury to the interests of such third party.

Canara Bank Versus CS Shyam and ors. Civil appeal no. 22 of 2009

Information regarding transfer and posting of the entire clerical staff from 01.01.2002 to 31.07.2006 in all the branches of Canara Bank. This information was in relation to the personal details of individual employees such as the date of his/her joining, designation, details of promotion earned, date of his/her joining to the Branch where he/she is posted, the authorities who issued the transfer orders etc. etc.

The Supreme Court disagreed with the order of the Central Information Commission, and the Kerala High Court. It did not give any reasons but effectively ruled that in the light of the Girish Deshpande judgement it ruled against information being given. It has truncated Section 8 (1) (j) and ruled that all personal information of public servants including details of transfers is covered by Section 8 (1) (j). This is a truncated reading of the Section 8 (1) (j) and cannot be justified.

Harinder Dhingra v. Bar Association, (CIC 2016) Facts of the case In the instant case, the appellant sought information pertaining to the numbers of complaints against advocates, cases disposed, and violation of the Advocates Act. Judgment The commission held that the Bar Council is a statutory body that was constituted as per the Advocates Act. The purpose of which is to protect the ethical standards of advocates and punish members for misconduct. It was held that Bar Councils are liable to provide information as per the Right to Information Act, 2005.

Shri Y N Prasad v. PIO, Ahlmad Evening Court, 2017 Facts of the case In the case, the appellant had sought information relating to judicial proceedings to which he was not a party. Judgment The Commission held that judicial proceedings and records are public records as per the Right to Information Act, 2005. Here, the appellant in this situation had every right to obtain the information he sought for. Moreover, the Public information officer was directed by the Chief Information Commission to offer proper inspection of the judicial record at a suitable time and day for both the concerned parties.

Jiju Lukose v. State of Kerala (Kerala High Court, 2014) Facts of the case In the case, a public interest litigation (PIL) seeking a direction to upload the copy of the FIR in the website of the police station and to make available copies of the FIR to the accused immediately on registration of the FIR was sought for. The Petitioner had alleged that inspite of the FIR being registered, the petitioner received its copy only after 2 months. Till the petitioner could obtain a copy of the FIR, the petitioner and his family members were in dark about the nature of the allegations levelled against the petitioner. Petitioner’s further contended in the case that in view of the Right to Information Act, 2005 all public officers were under obligation to put all information recorded in the public domain. The FIR which is lodged is to be put on the website of the police station, so that anyone can assess the FIR including a person staying outside the country. Judgment The CIC in the case held that FIR is a public document, however, where an FIR is covered by the provisions under Section 8(1) of the RTI Act, it need not be disclosed to the citizens till investigation is completed. But it can be claimed by the Informant and the accused as per legal provisions under the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 as a matter of legal right. The provisions in the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 are specific to this effect, that is, the supply of copy of FIR to the accused is contemplated only at a stage after proceedings are being initiated on a police report by the competent Magistrate. That application for copy of the FIR can also be submitted by any person under the 2005 Act. It is however, relevant to note that whether in a particular application police authorities are claiming exemption under 8(1) of the RTI Act is a question which has to be determined by the police authorities by taking appropriate decision by the competent authority. In event no such decision is taken to claim exemption under Section 8 of the 2005 Act, the police authorities are obliged to provide for copy of the FIR on an application under the RTI Act.

Vishwas Bhamburkar v. PIO, Housing & Urban Development Corporation Ltd. (CIC, 2018)

Facts of the case In this recent case taken up by the Chief Information Commission, Munirka, New Delhi (CIC), the CIC was confronted with two centric issues under the Right to Information Act, 2005. One pertaining to word limit in RTI application and the other relating to denial of information on lack of producing identity proof by the Applicant.

The CIC in the case held that the impugned application was not hit by any exception under the Right to Information Act. That the CPIO in the case raised suspicion about the citizenship of the applicant without explaining why he was suspecting. There was nothing to justify his suspicion. That the CPIO failed to justify the denial of information, as he could not site any clause of exception under Section 8 (exemption from disclosure of information) or Section 9 (grounds for rejection to access in certain cases).

Shahzad vs Department Of Posts, 2018

The appellant sought information on certified copy of the gazette notification which superseded the Department of Posts (Junior Hindi Translator & Senior Hindi Translator) Recruitment Rules, 1996 notified on 05.12.1996; certified copies of the gradation/seniority lists of the senior translators maintained/issued since 1983 to 2015 by the postal directorate; certified copies of the gradation/seniority lists of the junior translators maintained/issued since 1983 to 2015 by the postal directorate; certified copy of the gazette notification no. 20/2/79-SPB-1 dated 11.01.1983 regarding the Indian Posts and Telegraphs Department (Hindi Translators Grade-1, Grade-2, Grade-3 and Hindi Typists) Recruitment Rules, 1983. Part information was provided by the CPIO and transferred the application to the concerned authority. The appellant approached this Commission since he did not receive any information. The CPIO and other section of the public authority kicked the RTI request on point B2 to each other branches and ultimately denied it.

In the case, the CIC noted that the Respondent Department’s claim that concerned files were are not traceable proves the fact they had it in their possession, which binds them to provide the information by searching the same. The Commission also observed that frequent reference to ‘missing files’ as an excuse to deny the information is a major threat to transparency, accountability and also major reason for violation of Right to Information Act, 2005. Millions of RTI applications might have been rejected by PIOs on this ground during the last 11 years of RTI regime. It was also held that it is the duty of the information officer concerned to provide information, failing which is he or she inefficient and ineffective in his duties and obligations under the RTI, 2005.

The State of U.P. v. Raj Narain and others, 1975 Facts of the case Raj Narain, an Indian national, filed an election petition before the Allahabad High Court, alleging misuse of public finances by a political party for the re-election of the Prime Minister of India. For proving these allegations, he summoned the State Government of Uttar Pradesh to produce a document called Blue Book, which contained security guidelines for the protection of the Prime Minister in times of travel. In response, an official of the Home Security of Uttar Pradesh was instructed to claim a non-disclosure privilege under Section 123 of the Evidence Act. It states that “no one shall be permitted to give any evidence derived from unpublished official records relating to any affair of State except with the permission of the Officer at the Head of the Department concerned who shall give or withhold such permission as he thinks fit.” Upon the official’s failure to timely submit an affidavit, Narain argued that the government was obligated to produce the Blue Book because the government did not raise its non-disclosure privilege and that the document did not relate to the affairs of the State.

The Supreme Court of India upheld the High Court’s decision to disclose a government record. Raj Narain requested the government of the State of Uttar Pradesh to disclose the document “Blue Book” which contained security guidelines regarding the Prime Minister of India’s travel. Government officials declined to produce the document, claiming that it was an unpublished official record and against the public interest. The Court reasoned that the document was not an unpublished official record since the government official failed to file an affidavit to claim it as such. In addition, the Court reasoned that it had the authority to determine whether a document is of public interest.

S. P. Gupta v. Union of India, AIR 1982

The foregoing case dealt with a number of petitions involving important constitutional questions regarding the appointment and transfer of judges and the independence of judiciary. One of the issues raised was regarding the validity of Central Government orders on the non-appointment of two judges. To establish this claim, the petitioners sought the disclosure of correspondence between the Law Minister, the Chief Justice of Delhi, and the Chief Justice of India.

However, the state claimed privilege against disclosure of these documents under article 74(2) of the Indian Constitution, which provides that the advice tendered by the Council of Ministers to the President cannot be inquired into in any court, and section 123 of the Indian Evidence Act, which provides that evidence derived from unpublished official records on state affairs cannot be given without the permission of the head of the concerned department. Section 162 of the Evidence Act provides that a witness summoned to produce a document before a court must do so, and the court will decide upon any objection to this.

In a case decided by Justice Bhagwati, the Supreme Court of India rejected the government’s claim for protection against disclosure and directed the Union of India to disclose the documents containing the correspondence. An open and effective participatory democracy requires accountability and access to information by the public about the functioning of the government. Exposure to the public gaze in an open government will ensure a clean and healthy administration and is a powerful check against oppression, corruption, and misuse or abuse of authority. The concept of an open government is the direct emanation from the right to know, which is implicit in the right to freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution. Therefore, the disclosure of information in regard to government functioning must be the rule and secrecy the exception, justified only where the strictest requirement of public interest demands it. With respect to the contention involving Article 74(2), the Court held that while the advice by the Council of Ministers to the President would be protected against judicial scrutiny, the correspondence in this case between the Law Minister, the Chief Justice of Delhi, and the Chief Justice of India was not protected merely because it was referred to in the advice.

Indian Express Newspaper (Bombay) Pvt. Ltd. and others v. Union of India and others, 1985

The petitioners in this case were companies, employees, and shareholders thereof, as well as trusts engaged in the publication of newspapers. They challenged the import duty on newsprint under the Customs Tariff Act 1975 and the auxiliary duty under the Finance Act 1981, as modified by notifications under the Customs Act 1962 with effect from March 1, 1981. Prior to this notification, newsprint had enjoyed exemption from customs duty.

The petitioners contended that the imposition of this duty had an adverse effect on costs and circulation and, therefore, had a crippling effect on freedom of expression under Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution and the freedom to practice any trade or occupation under Article 19(1)(g). They further asserted that no public interest justified such an interference with these fundamental rights because the foreign exchange position of India was comfortable at the time. Finally, they submitted that the classification of newspapers into small, medium, and large newspapers violated the principle of non-arbitrariness under Article 14 of the Constitution (equality before law). The government argued that the burden of cost borne by the newspapers and the position of foreign exchange reserves were irrelevant considerations. The public interest involved in taxation was to increase the revenue of the government, a burden that is borne by all citizens of the country. It asserted that the exemption granted to newsprint was not justified and, therefore, could be removed by the government.

The Supreme Court of India observed that the government was indeed empowered to levy taxes affecting the publication of newspapers because such publication could be characterized as an industry and must be subject to the same levies as other industries. It also allowed that the classification into small, medium, and large based on economic considerations had a rational nexus with the objective of taxation and could not be considered arbitrary. However, where the power of taxation encroaches upon the freedom of expression under Article 19(1)(a), the restriction on the freedom must be within reasonable limits.

Reasonable limits have been outlined in Article 19(2) of the Indian Constitution, wherein “public interest” is a ground that may be taken to restrict freedom of expression. The Court concluded that two basic principles must be borne in mind: first, newspapers enjoy the benefits of government services like all other industries and must accordingly contribute a reasonable share of government revenue through taxation; and second, the burden of taxation must not be excessive.

Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, 2015

Police arrested two women for posting allegedly offensive and objectionable comments on Facebook about the propriety of shutting down the city of Mumbai after the death of a political leader. The police made the arrests under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act of 2000 (ITA), which punishes any person who sends through a computer resource or communication device any information that is grossly offensive, or with the knowledge of its falsity, the information is transmitted for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, insult, injury, hatred, or ill will. The main issue was whether Section 66A of ITA violated the right to freedom of expression guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India. As an exception to the right, Article 19(2) permits the government to impose “reasonable restrictions . . . in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offense.” The Petitioners argued that Section 66A was unconstitutional because its intended protection against annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, or ill-will fall outside the purview of Article 19(2).

The Supreme Court of India invalidated Section 66A of the Information Technology Act of 2000 in its entirety. The Court held that the prohibition against the dissemination of information by means of a computer resource or a communication device intended to cause annoyance, inconvenience or insult did not fall within any reasonable exceptions to the exercise of the right to freedom of expression.

The Court also addressed whether Section 66A is capable of imposing chilling effect on the right to freedom of expression. It held that because the provision fails to define terms, such as inconvenience or annoyance, “a very large amount of protected and innocent speech” could be curtailed.

Based on the forgoing reasons, the Court invalidated Section 66A of ITA in its entirety as it violated the right to freedom of expression guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India.

Namit Sharma v. Union of India, 2012

Sections 12(5), 12(6), 15(5), and 15(6) of India’s Right to Information (RTI) Act 2005 address the requirements of and restrictions on individuals appointed to Information Commissions. The original petitioner, Namit Sharma, alleged that the eligibility criteria were nonetheless vague and ultra vires the Constitution. The question before the Supreme Court was whether its previous reading into the RTI Act of a judicial experience requirement constituted “an error apparent on the face of the record”.

The Supreme Court of India held that it was ultimately for Parliament to decide whether it was appropriate to read into the Right to Information (RTI) Act a requirement that appointees to the Information Commission possess judicial qualifications and not the Judiciary. The Court reasoned that the Information Commissions do not exercise judicial powers, rather administrative ones and further, that not reading this requirement into the Act did not offend the doctrine of equality firstly because the “reading into” of words not intended by Parliament is “contrary to the principles of statutory interpretation recognized by this Court” and, secondly, the relevant sections of the Act did not “discriminate against any person in the matter of appointment”.

Shri Vijay Kamble v. Custom Department, Mumbai, 2009

The appellant asked for copies of show cause notices and other documents during the proceedings by Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) and currently under adjudicating by Commissioner of Customs (Exports). CPIO and the appellant authority declined to disclose the information variously citing sections 8(1)d, 8(1)h and 8(1)j of the RTI Act.

It was held that RTI cannot be invoked to access the information related to that proceedings. If intervention for disclosure of the information germane to an outgoing adjudication process is allowed. It will lead to questions being asked about proceeding before judicial courts and even the superior courts. This should go against the scheme of separation of powers under Constitution of India.

Rakesh Kumar Gupta v. Income Tax Appellant Tribunal (ITAT), 2007

The information sought by the appellant raises a very important question about whether under the Right to Information Act it is permissible to access information held by another public authority which acts in a judicial capacity, especially when the information pertains to its orders in that judicial proceedings and actions thereto. There may be other tribunals whose orders and records could similarly sought to be accessed through the Right to Information Act. This matter should, therefore, be considered by the full bench of the Commissioner.

It was held that judicial authority must function with total independence and freedom, should it be found that the action initiated under the RTI Act impinges under the authority of that judicial body, the Commission will not authorize the use of RTI Act for any such disclosure requirement. Section 8(1) (b) of the RTI Act is quite clear, which gives a total discretion to the court or the tribunal to decide as to what should be published.

D.P. Maheshwari v. CBI, 2009

Facts of the case The appellant sought the copy of SP’s, CBI report. In response to the application, SP, CBI responded that SP’s report is an confidential document and hence exempted under section 8(1)(h) of the RTI Act. CBI argued that the investigation report have details of the personal information of many persons and it’s disclosure will amount to invasion of privacy and thus qualify for exemption under section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act.

The plea of exemption under section 8 (1)(j) of the RTI Act cannot be applied as the appellant is asking for the information about his own case. Even if the report contains personal information about others, the principle of severability under section 10(1) can be applied. The Commission agreed that disclosure of complete report may impede the process of information and amount to invasion of privacy of the persons mentioned in the report. As such section 8(1)(g) is applicable. However, since the appellant is not the accused the information regarding him cannot be held to be such as to be impede the process of investigation and prosecution. Accordingly part of information exonerating the appellant may be provided as per Sub-section 1 of Section 10 of the RTI Act.

Mangla Ram Jat v. PIO, Banaras Hindu University, 2008

In this case the Commission explained it’s role, ambit and scope of exemption and the context of the RTI Act. The Commission is conscious of the fact that it has been established under the Act and being an adjudicating body under the Act, it cannot take upon itself the role of the legislature and import new exemptions and substitute their own views for those of Parliament. The Act leaves no such liberty with the adjudicating authorities to read law beyond what it is stated explicitly.

Right to information as part of the fundamental right of freedom of speech and expression is well established in our constitutional jurisprudence. The Commission is of the view that the Commission, an adjudicating body which is a creation of the Act, has no authority to import new exemptions and in the process curtail the fundamental rights of information of citizens.

Dhananjay Tripathi v. Banaras Hindu University, 2016

The applicant had applied for information relating to the treatment and subsequent death of a student in a university hospital due to alleged negligence of the doctors attending him. The appellant was, however, denied the information by the PIO of the university saying that the information sought could not be provided under section 8 (1)(g) of the RTI Act. No further reasons as to how the information sought could not be provided under the RTI Act was given.

The Commission has held that quoting the provisions of section 8 (1) of the RTI Act to deny the information without giving any justification or grounds as to how these provisions are applicable is simply not acceptable, and clearly amount to malafide denial of legitimate information.

The public authority must provide reasons for rejection the particular application. The Commission further held that not providing the reasons of how the application for information was rejected according to a particular provision of the Act would attract penalties under section 20(1) of the Act.

Shri R.B. Sharma v. DGCEI, New Delhi, 2007

Facts of the case The appellant sought all documents including file noting pertaining to sanction of reward to the applicant. The CPIO denied the information under section 8 (1)(g) of the RTI Act, contending that the disclosure would expose the source of information and also endanger the life and the Physical safety of the officers who handled and processed the matter. The appellant authority upheld the decision of CPIO.

The appellant may be allowed inspection of the relevant file by the respondent with the proviso that the respondent shall be free to apply the severability clause under section 10(1) of the RTI Act withhold from disclosure that part of the information in the file which is unconnected with the appellant.

Shri Rajesh Mannalal Katariya v. Addl. Commissioner of Income Tax, Pune

Facts of the case The appellant sought information regarding confidential reports submitted by lower formations to higher formations, which was denied by the respondent to the appellant. The appellant approach the CIC for seeking the information.

It was held that the decision of the respondents not to disclose the requested information valid under the provisions of the RTI Act. The appellant may should be wish, approach the CBDT for the information, who will no-doubt process the case under the provisions of the RTI Act for a decision about disclose or otherwise.

S.K. Lal v. Ministry of Railways, 2006

The applicant has filed five applications to the railway authorities asking for “all the records” regarding various services and categories of staff in the railways. The public authority, however, did not provide him the information requested.

The CIC observed that though the RTI Act allows citizen to seek any information other than the 10 categories exempted under section 8, it does not mean that the public authorities required to entertain to all sort of frivolous applications.

Shri B S Manian v. Department of posts, 2007

Facts of the case The appellant who was the main offender in the fraud case sought certain information regarding Disciplinary proceedings initiated against him. The CPIO has refused to provide the documents asked for under section 8 (1)(h) & (g) of the RTI Act, 2005. Judgment

A disciplinary action against the appellant is contemplated on the basis of the charge sheet memo issued to him under the CCS (CCA) rules. The denial of information sought under section 8 (1)(h) of the RTI Act is therefore justified.

Sarvesh Kaushal v. F.C.I. and others, 2006

The appellant had applied for documents relating to the departmental enquiry launched against him in a corruption case.

The CIC rejecting the appeal, held that the departmental enquiry, which was in progress against him, was a pending investigation under law, and the same attracted the provisions of section 8 (1)(h) of the RTI Act. Therefore, there is no question of disclosing any information relating to the prosecution, the CIC noted.

www.scobserver.in
https://www.vakilno1.com/legal-news/important-judgments-on-right-to-information.html
https://www.livelaw.in/

Judicial Services Syllabus of Various States

Kanooniyat kuriosity kuiz series: register by 20th aug.

AOR Exam Leading Cases Supreme Court

Cuet pg llm syllabus 2024: subject-wise syllabus details, what to look for in a criminal lawyer, sources and schools of hindu marriage act, 1955, leave a comment cancel reply.

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

Latest News

International Law Summit: 4th Bombay Bar Association - Government Law College International Law Summit, 2024

4th Bombay Bar Association – GLC International Law Summit, 2024

AOR Exam Leading Cases Supreme Court of India: AOR Exam Supreme Court Cases and Material related to Supreme Court AOR Exam 2024

Interpreting Emojis in Legal Battles: A Case Study

Redemption and Release of Gold under the Customs Act, 1962

Key legal tips everyone should know: understanding serious offenses.

Online Law Internship in IPR & Technology Law at Our Legal World

TAX LAWS CLUB

Free Samples
Premium Essays
Editing Services Editing Proofreading Rewriting
Extra Tools Essay Topic Generator Thesis Generator Citation Generator GPA Calculator Study Guides Donate Paper
Essay Writing Help
About Us About Us Testimonials FAQ
Law Case Study
Samples List

An case study examples on law is a prosaic composition of a small volume and free composition, expressing individual impressions and thoughts on a specific occasion or issue and obviously not claiming a definitive or exhaustive interpretation of the subject.

Some signs of law case study:

the presence of a specific topic or question. A work devoted to the analysis of a wide range of problems in biology, by definition, cannot be performed in the genre of law case study topic.
The case study expresses individual impressions and thoughts on a specific occasion or issue, in this case, on law and does not knowingly pretend to a definitive or exhaustive interpretation of the subject.
As a rule, an essay suggests a new, subjectively colored word about something, such a work may have a philosophical, historical, biographical, journalistic, literary, critical, popular scientific or purely fiction character.
in the content of an case study samples on law , first of all, the author’s personality is assessed - his worldview, thoughts and feelings.

The goal of an case study in law is to develop such skills as independent creative thinking and writing out your own thoughts.

Writing an case study is extremely useful, because it allows the author to learn to clearly and correctly formulate thoughts, structure information, use basic concepts, highlight causal relationships, illustrate experience with relevant examples, and substantiate his conclusions.

Studentshare

Examples List on Law Case Study

TERMS & CONDITIONS
PRIVACY POLICY
COOKIES POLICY

University of Bristol Law School

Success for professor alan bogg and unite’s legal team in landmark uk supreme court labour law case.

Press release issued: 23 April 2024

The Law School’s Professor of Labour Law Alan Bogg appeared in the UK Supreme Court on Wednesday 17 April, as part of UNITE’s legal team acting on behalf of a care worker in an important right to strike case.

In a landmark ruling on 17 April, the Supreme Court found in favour of the legal team brought together by UNISON, including Professor Alan Bogg and former University of Bristol Law School Professor Michael Ford KC. The team acted on behalf of Fiona Mercer, a care worker and trade union representative whose employer suspended her after she became involved in a dispute over plans to cut payments for staff for sleep-in shifts.

Fiona Mercer won at the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) in 2021, which stated she should not be victimised for participating in strike action. Though her employer did not intend to appeal, the then business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng took over the case and appealed to the Court of Appeal, which reversed the EAT ruling in 2022. This reflected the profound political significance of the litigation.

UNISON took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which found last week that the current law failed to uphold protection for workers from sanctions short of dismissal, effectively nullifying the right to take lawful strike action, which was incompatible with Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Professor Alan Bogg said: "This is a case of historic significance for protection of the human right to strike in UK law. The Supreme Court has recognized that UK law should protect individual strikers engaged in lawful strike action from victimization by their employers. As far as we are aware, it is also the first time a declaration of incompatibility has been issued in an employment case under the Human Rights Act 1998."

Over the past decade, University of Bristol Law School academics and alumni have been heavily involved in several high-profile labour law cases – including the P&O Ferries ‘fire and rehire’ scandal , the groundbreaking judgment on Tribunal Fees appealed by UNISON , and the landmark Supreme Court judgment in Kostal v Dunkley on the scope of lawful individual offers in collective bargaining – making the case for regulatory change to protect workers’ rights in Parliament and the courts.

They regularly provide expert analysis of domestic, EU and international employment and human rights law in Supreme Court cases, in parliamentary hearings and in written advice for trade unions and related bodies.

Further information

Professor Alan Bogg is a Professor of Labour Law and a member of the Centre for Law at Work, home to one of the largest cohorts of labour academics and lawyers in the country. His research focuses on the fields of labour, employment and work laws, exploring these areas from philosophical, doctrinal and comparative perspectives. His work also uses political philosophy to explore problems in the regulation of work, as well as examining the worker-protective aspects of common law reasoning. His current research projects are examining freedom of association, human rights at work, and the role of the common law and private law in protecting workers’ rights.

The Centre for Law at Work is dedicated to fostering an interdisciplinary dialogue around legal issues related to work. Embracing a wide range of methodological approaches to the study of law at work, the Centre’s members academics combine internationally-recognised research profiles with a wealth of experience working with organisations that are responsible for policy-development, professional regulation and social advocacy. By engaging diverse voices and perspectives the Centre aims to influence policy at national, transnational and international levels

Find out more about student opportunities at the Centre for Law at Work.

Case Studies

Supreme Court allows BEST (Brihan Mumbai Electricity Supply & Transport) customer of Mumbai to move to Tata power and get 50% cheaper Electricity.

Orissa High court decision in legal matter of Orissa Manganese and Mineral Pvt. Ltd. Vs Adhunik Steel Ltd. AIR 2005 113 on termination of mining contract of leasehold land.

Apex Court judgement in Orissa Mining Corporation v Ministry of Environment and Forest matter related to rights of Schedule Tribe and traditional Forest dwellers.

Delhi High Court declined to give its approval to a foreign decree that granted divorce on the ground of irretrievable breakdown of marriage.

Skip & continue

Thank You For Submitting Your Query. We will get back to you shortly.

In Compliance with Indian Regulations, Kindly Review the User Acknowledgement and Disclaimer below and then Proceed.

User Acknowledgement

By proceeding further and clicking on the "ACCEPT" button herein below, I acknowledge that I of my own accord wish to know more about Law Senate (LS) for my own information and use. I further acknowledge that there has been no solicitation, invitation or inducement of any sort whatsoever from Law Senate (LS) or any of its members to create an Attorney-Client relationship through this website. I further acknowledge having read and understood the Disclaimer below

This website (www.lawsenate.com) is a resource for informational purposes only and is intended, but not promised or guaranteed, to be correct, complete, and up-to-date. Law Senate (LS) does not warrant that the information contained on this website is accurate or complete, and hereby disclaims any and all liability to any person for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident or any other cause. Law Senate (LS) further assumes no liability for the interpretation and/or use of the information contained on this website, nor does it offer a warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied. The owner/Partners of this website do not intend links from this site to other internet websites to be referrals to, endorsements of, or affiliations with the linked entities. Law Senate (LS) is not responsible for, and makes no representations or warranties about, the contents of Web sites to which links may be provided from this Web site.

This website is not intended to be a source of advertising or solicitation and the contents of the website should not be construed as legal advice. The reader should not consider this information to be an invitation for a lawyer-client relationship and should not rely on information provided herein and should always seek the advice of competent counsel licensed to practice in the reader's country/state. Transmission, receipt or use of this website does not constitute or create a lawyer-client relationship. No recipients of content from this website should act, or refrain from acting, based upon any or all of the contents of this site.

Furthermore, the owner of this website does not wish to represent anyone desiring representation based solely upon viewing this Web site or in a country/state where this website fails to comply with all laws and ethical rules of that state. Finally, the reader is warned that the use of Internet e-mail for confidential or sensitive information is susceptible to risks of lack of confidentiality associated with sending email over the Internet.

--> Login or Sign Up

Shop by Author

Sabrineh Ardalan
Robert Bordone
Robert Clark
John Coates
Susan Crawford
Alonzo Emery
Heidi Gardner
Philip B. Heymann
Howell E. Jackson
Wendy Jacobs
Adriaan Lanni
Jeremy McClane
Naz Modirzadeh
Catherine Mondell
Ashish Nanda
Charles R. Nesson
John Palfrey
Bruce Patton
Todd D. Rakoff
Lisa Rohrer
Jeswald W. Salacuse
James Sebenius
Joseph William Singer
Holger Spamann
Carol Steiker
Guhan Subramanian
Lawrence Susskind
David B. Wilkins
Jonathan Zittrain

Shop by Brand

Howell Jackson

Ashish Nanda and Nicholas Semi Haas
Chad M. Carr
John Coates, Clayton Rose, and David Lane
Ashish Nanda and Lauren Prusiner
Ashish Nanda and Lisa Rohrer
Ashish Nanda and Monet Brewerton
View all Brands

Free Materials

Published Old-New
Published New-Old

Investor Access to Private Investment

Hannah Valentine under the supervision of Howell Jackson

First National Bank of Ames Corporation

Share-Inn Economy: Student Materials

Emily M. Broad Leib, Jude Lee, Amy Hoover & Rachel Gordon

Share-Inn Economy: Teaching Note

“Home canned crushed tomatoes” by Susy Morris is licensed under (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Share-Inn Economy (C)

Emily M. Broad Leib, Jude Lee & Amy Hoover

Share-Inn Economy (A)

phone with "robo advisors" written on screen

Robo Advising

Ryan Chan-Wei HLS LLM '19 under the supervision of Howell Jackson

Fintech Charter

Margaret Tahyar, Madison Roberts, and Carol Rodrigues of Davis Polk & Wardwell, with the assistance of Professor Howell E. Jackson

Strategic Options and Legal Risks for Elite ReFi, Inc.

Margaret Tahyar, Jai Massari, Madison Roberts, and Adam Fovent of Davis Polk & Wardwell, with the assistance of Professor Howell E. Jackson

Civilian Protection in Partnered Conflicts

Dustin A. Lewis, Naz K. Modirzadeh, C. Danae Paterson, Lisa Brem

OUR Walmart

Sharon Block, Lisa Brem, and Brittany Deitch

Worker Centers

Exercise on Alternative Strategies for Depository Institutions

Sanctuary Cities

Brittany Deitch and Lisa Brem, under the supervision of Sabrineh Ardalan

Wells Fargo Corporate Governance

Ed Stein under the supervision of Howell Jackson

Anti-Money Laundering and Blockchain Technology

Dylan M. Aluise under the supervision of Howell Jackson

The Future of Affiliate Transaction Restrictions for Banks and the Federal Reserve’s Emergency Intervention Authority

Margaret Tahyar and Howell Jackson

Closed-End Fund Regulation

Daniel Wertman under the Supervision of Howell Jackson

Unidentified Financial Institutions

Howell Jackson and Peter Tufano with assistance from Andrea Ryan

Asset Securitization, Marketplace Lending, and the Future After the Madden Decision

Cordray speaking on behalf of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Responding to the PHH Litigation

Ryan M. Johansen under the supervision of Howell Jackson

close-up of a 20-dollar bill and Benjamin Franklin's face

Wal-Mart and Banking

Joshua Cutler under the supervision of Howell Jackson

Lending Club: 2008

Anooshree Sinha and Corrine Snow under the supervision of Howell Jackson

Ames’ Auto Insurance Regulations — Racial Disparities in Insurance Premiums

calculator, expense sheet, and pen on a desk

Federal Preemption of State Consumer Protection Laws: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's Dodd-Frank Act Implementation Rules

Melanie Berdecia and Dylan Aluise under supervision of Howell Jackson

The OCC’s FinTech Charter: Testing the Scope of the OCC’s Chartering Powers

Lotus v. Borland: A Case Study in Software Copyright

Ben Sobel, under the supervision of Jonathan Zittrain

The Color of Police Action in these United States

Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, under supervision of Charles R. Nesson

The Decriminalization of Marijuana in Jamaica: A Key Step toward International Legalization?

Thinking Big: Bringing Big Sport's Energy and Innovation to Education

Elizabeth Moroney, under supervision of Charles R. Nesson

poster of Snowden partially removed on telephone post

The Snowden Effect

Anastasia Tolu, under supervision of Charles R. Nesson

The Art of Deliberation

Algorithmic Allegories (version 1.0)

Marcus Comiter, Ben Sobel, and Jonathan Zittrain

Somalia in Crisis: Famine, Counterterrorism, & Humanitarian Aid | Part B2: The NGO General Counsel Dilemma

Naz K. Modirzadeh, Dustin A. Lewis, and Molly R. Gray, with Lisa Brem

Somalia in Crisis: Famine, Counterterrorism, & Humanitarian Aid | Part B1: The National Security Council Dilemma

Somalia in Crisis: Famine, Counterterrorism, & Humanitarian Aid | Part A: General Background Document

magnifying glass magnifies the word copyright

What’s Fair about Fair Use? The Battle over E-Reserves at GSU (B)

Elizabeth Moroney, under the supervision of Kyle Courtney and William Fisher

1's and 0's on a black background with silver sphere

Prosecutorial Discretion in Charging and Plea Bargaining: The Aaron Swartz Case (B)

Elizabeth Moroney, under the supervision of Adriaan Lanni and Carol Steiker

magnifying glass magnifies the word copyright in a dictionary

What’s Fair about Fair Use? The Battle over E-Reserves at GSU (A)

The Battle for Unocal

Holger Spamann, Amanda Ravich, and Lisa Brem

strings of 1's and 0's with a grey sphere and black background

Prosecutorial Discretion in Charging and Plea Bargaining: The Aaron Swartz Case (A)

Elizabeth Moroney, under supervision of Adriaan Lanni and Carol Steiker

Sue the Consumer: Digital Copyright in the New Millennium

Charles Nesson and Sarah Jeong

MOOCs and Consequences for the Future of Education

Jeffrey R. Young and Charles Nesson

In the Stadium and in the Street: The Brazil Soccer Riots

Cost-Benefit Analysis at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Howell Jackson and Kelley O'Mara

Ching Pow: Far East Yardies!!

Charles Nesson and Saptarishi Bandopadhyay

From Sony to SOPA: The Technology-Content Divide

John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert, and Lisa Brem

Game Changers: Mobile Gaming Apps and Data Privacy

Susan Crawford, Jonathan Zittrain and Lisa Brem

The Smart Grid

Sonia McNeil, with Paul Kominers, J. Palfrey and J. Zittrain

multi-panel code on black backlit computer screen

The WikiLeaks Incident: Background, Details, and Resources

Alan Ezekiel, under supervision of John Palfrey and Jonathan Zittrain

Drafting an IP Strategy at MNC (C): New Puzzles

John Palfrey and Lisa Brem

Drafting an IP Strategy at MNC (B): Getting Started

Drafting an IP Strategy at MNC (A)

How to Approach a Case Study in a Problem Solving Workshop

Discounts and promotions
Delivery and payment

Cart is empty!

Case study definition

Case study, a term which some of you may know from the "Case Study of Vanitas" anime and manga, is a thorough examination of a particular subject, such as a person, group, location, occasion, establishment, phenomena, etc. They are most frequently utilized in research of business, medicine, education and social behaviour. There are a different types of case studies that researchers might use:

• Collective case studies

• Descriptive case studies

• Explanatory case studies

• Exploratory case studies

• Instrumental case studies

• Intrinsic case studies

Case studies are usually much more sophisticated and professional than regular essays and courseworks, as they require a lot of verified data, are research-oriented and not necessarily designed to be read by the general public.

How to write a case study?

It very much depends on the topic of your case study, as a medical case study and a coffee business case study have completely different sources, outlines, target demographics, etc. But just for this example, let's outline a coffee roaster case study. Firstly, it's likely going to be a problem-solving case study, like most in the business and economics field are. Here are some tips for these types of case studies:

• Your case scenario should be precisely defined in terms of your unique assessment criteria.

• Determine the primary issues by analyzing the scenario. Think about how they connect to the main ideas and theories in your piece.

• Find and investigate any theories or methods that might be relevant to your case.

• Keep your audience in mind. Exactly who are your stakeholder(s)? If writing a case study on coffee roasters, it's probably gonna be suppliers, landlords, investors, customers, etc.

• Indicate the best solution(s) and how they should be implemented. Make sure your suggestions are grounded in pertinent theories and useful resources, as well as being realistic, practical, and attainable.

• Carefully proofread your case study. Keep in mind these four principles when editing: clarity, honesty, reality and relevance.

Are there any online services that could write a case study for me?

Luckily, there are!

We completely understand and have been ourselves in a position, where we couldn't wrap our head around how to write an effective and useful case study, but don't fear - our service is here.

We are a group that specializes in writing all kinds of case studies and other projects for academic customers and business clients who require assistance with its creation. We require our writers to have a degree in your topic and carefully interview them before they can join our team, as we try to ensure quality above all. We cover a great range of topics, offer perfect quality work, always deliver on time and aim to leave our customers completely satisfied with what they ordered.

The ordering process is fully online, and it goes as follows:

• Select the topic and the deadline of your case study.

• Provide us with any details, requirements, statements that should be emphasized or particular parts of the writing process you struggle with.

• Leave the email address, where your completed order will be sent to.

• Select your payment type, sit back and relax!

With lots of experience on the market, professionally degreed writers, online 24/7 customer support and incredibly low prices, you won't find a service offering a better deal than ours.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

This article is part of the research topic.

Traditional Knowledge in Food Activism and Governance

Indigenous values and perspectives for strengthening food security and sovereignty: Learning from a community-based case study of Miskoziibiing (Bloodvein River First Nation), Manitoba, Canada Provisionally Accepted

1 Other, Canada
2 University of Winnipeg, Canada

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Despite food security being a significant challenge among many First Nations communities on Turtle Island, there needs to be more empirical, community-based research that underscores the role of traditional food systems and associated values and teachings in Manitoban communities through an Indigenous lens. This research addresses that gap by building upon Indigenous perspectives and knowledges on the status and future directions of food security and sovereignty in Misko-ziibiing (Bloodvein River First Nation). Guided by Indigenous research protocol and using a qualitative research approach, ten in-depth interviews with Bloodvein River First Nation (BVR) and Winnipeg Elders were conducted. Data was also sourced through discussions with local council members, participant observation, and field visits during 2017. The fundamental values and traditional teachings associated with food sovereignty within the community are aligned with the spirit of sharing, including sharing ethics and protocols, social learning within the community, and intergenerational transmission. In recent years, changing environmental, developmental activity, government policies and laws, lifestyle changes and affordability dynamics have continued to threaten the self-determination and food sovereignty of Indigenous peoples in the community. Their perspectives, teachings, and voices are rarely present in any scholarly work. Enhanced intergenerational transmission of traditional teachings, education and language revitalization, and local leadership involvement can strengthen these social and cultural values to enhance Indigenous food security and sovereignty in Miskoziibiing. This research identifies the knowledge and views of Elders, hunters, trappers and fishers, contributing to the current studies associated with traditional food systems and teachings. Strengthening social and cultural traditions and values is vital in working towards Indigenous food governance, sovereignty, and revitalization of their Indigenous food systems.

Keywords: Indigenous values1, social values2, cultural values3, food sovereingty4, food system governance5, Indigenous food security6, traditional foods7, self-determination8

Received: 13 Oct 2023; Accepted: 22 Apr 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Young, Shukla and Wilson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: PhD. Shailesh Shukla, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, R3B 2E9, Manitoba, Canada

People also looked at

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

Publications
Our Methods
Short Reads
Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S.

More Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2021 than in any other year on record, according to the latest available statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That included record numbers of both gun murders and gun suicides. Despite the increase in such fatalities, the rate of gun deaths – a statistic that accounts for the nation’s growing population – remained below the levels of earlier decades.

Here’s a closer look at gun deaths in the United States, based on a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the CDC, the FBI and other sources. You can also read key public opinion findings about U.S. gun violence and gun policy .

This Pew Research Center analysis examines the changing number and rate of gun deaths in the United States. It is based primarily on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The CDC’s statistics are based on information contained in official death certificates, while the FBI’s figures are based on information voluntarily submitted by thousands of police departments around the country.

For the number and rate of gun deaths over time, we relied on mortality statistics in the CDC’s WONDER database covering four distinct time periods: 1968 to 1978 , 1979 to 1998 , 1999 to 2020 , and 2021 . While these statistics are mostly comparable for the full 1968-2021 period, gun murders and suicides between 1968 and 1978 are classified by the CDC as involving firearms and explosives; those between 1979 and 2021 are classified as involving firearms only. Similarly, gun deaths involving law enforcement between 1968 and 1978 exclude those caused by “operations of war”; those between 1979 and 2021 include that category, which refers to gun deaths among military personnel or civilians due to war or civil insurrection in the U.S . All CDC gun death estimates in this analysis are adjusted to account for age differences over time and across states.

The FBI’s statistics about the types of firearms used in gun murders in 2020 come from the bureau’s Crime Data Explorer website . Specifically, they are drawn from the expanded homicide tables of the agency’s 2020 Crime in the United States report . The FBI’s statistics include murders and non-negligent manslaughters involving firearms.

How many people die from gun-related injuries in the U.S. each year?

In 2021, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC. That figure includes gun murders and gun suicides, along with three less common types of gun-related deaths tracked by the CDC: those that were accidental, those that involved law enforcement and those whose circumstances could not be determined. The total excludes deaths in which gunshot injuries played a contributing, but not principal, role. (CDC fatality statistics are based on information contained in official death certificates, which identify a single cause of death.)

A pie chart showing that suicides accounted for more than half of U.S. gun deaths in 2021.

What share of U.S. gun deaths are murders and what share are suicides?

Though they tend to get less public attention than gun-related murders, suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths . In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC. The remaining gun deaths that year were accidental (549), involved law enforcement (537) or had undetermined circumstances (458).

What share of all murders and suicides in the U.S. involve a gun?

About eight-in-ten U.S. murders in 2021 – 20,958 out of 26,031, or 81% – involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. More than half of all suicides in 2021 – 26,328 out of 48,183, or 55% – also involved a gun, the highest percentage since 2001.

A line chart showing that the U.S. saw a record number of gun suicides and gun murders in 2021.

How has the number of U.S. gun deaths changed over time?

The record 48,830 total gun deaths in 2021 reflect a 23% increase since 2019, before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic .

Gun murders, in particular, have climbed sharply during the pandemic, increasing 45% between 2019 and 2021, while the number of gun suicides rose 10% during that span.

The overall increase in U.S. gun deaths since the beginning of the pandemic includes an especially stark rise in such fatalities among children and teens under the age of 18. Gun deaths among children and teens rose 50% in just two years , from 1,732 in 2019 to 2,590 in 2021.

How has the rate of U.S. gun deaths changed over time?

While 2021 saw the highest total number of gun deaths in the U.S., this statistic does not take into account the nation’s growing population. On a per capita basis, there were 14.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2021 – the highest rate since the early 1990s, but still well below the peak of 16.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 1974.

A line chart that shows the U.S. gun suicide and gun murder rates reached near-record highs in 2021.

The gun murder rate in the U.S. remains below its peak level despite rising sharply during the pandemic. There were 6.7 gun murders per 100,000 people in 2021, below the 7.2 recorded in 1974.

The gun suicide rate, on the other hand, is now on par with its historical peak. There were 7.5 gun suicides per 100,000 people in 2021, statistically similar to the 7.7 measured in 1977. (One caveat when considering the 1970s figures: In the CDC’s database, gun murders and gun suicides between 1968 and 1978 are classified as those caused by firearms and explosives. In subsequent years, they are classified as deaths involving firearms only.)

Which states have the highest and lowest gun death rates in the U.S.?

The rate of gun fatalities varies widely from state to state. In 2021, the states with the highest total rates of gun-related deaths – counting murders, suicides and all other categories tracked by the CDC – included Mississippi (33.9 per 100,000 people), Louisiana (29.1), New Mexico (27.8), Alabama (26.4) and Wyoming (26.1). The states with the lowest total rates included Massachusetts (3.4), Hawaii (4.8), New Jersey (5.2), New York (5.4) and Rhode Island (5.6).

A map showing that U.S. gun death rates varied widely by state in 2021.

The results are somewhat different when looking at gun murder and gun suicide rates separately. The places with the highest gun murder rates in 2021 included the District of Columbia (22.3 per 100,000 people), Mississippi (21.2), Louisiana (18.4), Alabama (13.9) and New Mexico (11.7). Those with the lowest gun murder rates included Massachusetts (1.5), Idaho (1.5), Hawaii (1.6), Utah (2.1) and Iowa (2.2). Rate estimates are not available for Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont or Wyoming.

The states with the highest gun suicide rates in 2021 included Wyoming (22.8 per 100,000 people), Montana (21.1), Alaska (19.9), New Mexico (13.9) and Oklahoma (13.7). The states with the lowest gun suicide rates were Massachusetts (1.7), New Jersey (1.9), New York (2.0), Hawaii (2.8) and Connecticut (2.9). Rate estimates are not available for the District of Columbia.

How does the gun death rate in the U.S. compare with other countries?

The gun death rate in the U.S. is much higher than in most other nations, particularly developed nations. But it is still far below the rates in several Latin American countries, according to a 2018 study of 195 countries and territories by researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

The U.S. gun death rate was 10.6 per 100,000 people in 2016, the most recent year in the study, which used a somewhat different methodology from the CDC. That was far higher than in countries such as Canada (2.1 per 100,000) and Australia (1.0), as well as European nations such as France (2.7), Germany (0.9) and Spain (0.6). But the rate in the U.S. was much lower than in El Salvador (39.2 per 100,000 people), Venezuela (38.7), Guatemala (32.3), Colombia (25.9) and Honduras (22.5), the study found. Overall, the U.S. ranked 20th in its gun fatality rate that year .

How many people are killed in mass shootings in the U.S. every year?

This is a difficult question to answer because there is no single, agreed-upon definition of the term “mass shooting.” Definitions can vary depending on factors including the number of victims and the circumstances of the shooting.

The FBI collects data on “active shooter incidents,” which it defines as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Using the FBI’s definition, 103 people – excluding the shooters – died in such incidents in 2021 .

The Gun Violence Archive, an online database of gun violence incidents in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are shot, even if no one was killed (again excluding the shooters). Using this definition, 706 people died in these incidents in 2021 .

Regardless of the definition being used, fatalities in mass shooting incidents in the U.S. account for a small fraction of all gun murders that occur nationwide each year.

How has the number of mass shootings in the U.S. changed over time?

A bar chart showing that active shooter incidents have become more common in the U.S. in recent years.

The same definitional issue that makes it challenging to calculate mass shooting fatalities comes into play when trying to determine the frequency of U.S. mass shootings over time. The unpredictability of these incidents also complicates matters: As Rand Corp. noted in a research brief , “Chance variability in the annual number of mass shooting incidents makes it challenging to discern a clear trend, and trend estimates will be sensitive to outliers and to the time frame chosen for analysis.”

The FBI found an increase in active shooter incidents between 2000 and 2021. There were three such incidents in 2000. By 2021, that figure had increased to 61.

Which types of firearms are most commonly used in gun murders in the U.S.?

In 2020, the most recent year for which the FBI has published data, handguns were involved in 59% of the 13,620 U.S. gun murders and non-negligent manslaughters for which data is available. Rifles – the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as “assault weapons” – were involved in 3% of firearm murders. Shotguns were involved in 1%. The remainder of gun homicides and non-negligent manslaughters (36%) involved other kinds of firearms or those classified as “type not stated.”

It’s important to note that the FBI’s statistics do not capture the details on all gun murders in the U.S. each year. The FBI’s data is based on information voluntarily submitted by police departments around the country, and not all agencies participate or provide complete information each year.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published on Aug. 16, 2019.

Partisanship & Issues
Political Issues
Politics & Policy

About 1 in 4 U.S. teachers say their school went into a gun-related lockdown in the last school year

Striking findings from 2023, key facts about americans and guns, for most u.s. gun owners, protection is the main reason they own a gun, gun violence widely viewed as a major – and growing – national problem, most popular.

1615 L St. NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 | Media Inquiries

Research Topics

Age & Generations
Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Economy & Work
Family & Relationships
Gender & LGBTQ
Immigration & Migration
International Affairs
Internet & Technology
Methodological Research
News Habits & Media
Non-U.S. Governments
Other Topics
Race & Ethnicity
Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

Terms & Conditions

Cookie Settings

Reprints, Permissions & Use Policy

IMAGES

What is Law case study? by My Assignment Experts
How to Answer a Legal Problem Question
Labour law case analysis
Company Law Case Laws Book by CS Tushar Pahade
How to read a case law?
[CASE LAW] Study Unit 1

VIDEO

Presentation activity l Case study on labour laws of United States of America l BIET Jhansi l #song
The 1st & 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics Are Frauds
Modeling Legal Systems and Complexity
Scholars Explore ‘Law in American History, Vol. III’
HOW TO STUDY CASE LAWS OR CITATIONS TIPS AND TRICKS
Laws of logarithms 🌹🌹🌹 Maths #maths #math

COMMENTS

Harvard Law School
The Case Study Teaching Method; Harvard Law Case Studies A-Z; Free Materials; Blog; Shop By Category; Harvard Law Case Studies A-Z; Free Materials; Program; Role Play; Workshop-Based Case Study; Discussion-Based Case Study; DVD; Subject; Sabrineh Ardalan; Sharon Block; Robert Bordone; Emily M. Broad Leib; Chad Carr; Robert Clark; John Coates ...
Online Courses and Casebooks
Each video tells the story of an important Supreme Court case, and then shows you how to read the case yourself. Open Casebook. The course explores the current law of copyright; the impact of that law on art, entertainment, and industry; and the ongoing debates concerning how the law should be reformed. The Case Studies
US Case Law, Court Opinions & Decisions :: Justia
Case law, also known as precedent or common law, is the body of prior judicial decisions that guide judges deciding issues before them. Depending on the relationship between the deciding court and the precedent, case law may be binding or merely persuasive. For example, a decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is binding on ...
CaseBriefs
FREE. All content is free for all to use, as we are supported by our strategic partners who utilize Casebriefs ™ to connect to the Higher Education and Professional Markets. Access the world's largest database of Free Case Briefs for Law Students. Curated from law school case books, includes links for optimal case understanding.
The Case Studies Blog
In 2017, HLS Case Studies published 16 new case studies, 11 of which are free to download. Browse all 40 free case studies, including Bank Secrecy Act, Anti-Money Laundering Law Compliance, and Blockchain Technology, the most popular case study published in 2017. Negotiation instructors might want to review Mortgage Crisis Call, our most viewed new case, which has been viewed nearly 20,000 ...
Case Study Resources
The Pluralism Project Case Study Initiative seeks to understand how the case method can be useful in creatively addressing theological and religious studies issues through teaching and learning. The texts relate to issues in civil society, public life, and religious communities. Teaching Negotiation Resource Center.
The Case Study Teaching Method
The Case Study Teaching Method. It is easy to get confused between the case study method and the case method, particularly as it applies to legal education. The case method in legal education was invented by Christopher Columbus Langdell, Dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1895. Langdell conceived of a way to systematize and simplify legal ...
Introduction
Introduction. Every law student and practicing attorney must be able to find, read, analyze, and interpret case law. Under the common law principles of stare decisis, a court must follow the decisions in previous cases on the same legal topic. Therefore, finding cases is essential to finding out what the law is on a particular issue.
Law: Articles, Research, & Case Studies on Law
by Victoria Ivashina and Boris Vallée. Prior to the 2020 pandemic, the leveraged loan market experienced an unprecedented boom, which came hand in hand with significant changes in contracting terms. This study presents large-sample evidence of what constitutes contractual weakness from the creditors' perspective.
Legal Research: A Guide to Case Law
Introduction. Each branch of government produces a different type of law. Case law is the body of law developed from judicial opinions or decisions over time (whereas statutory law comes from legislative bodies and administrative law comes from executive bodies). This guide introduces beginner legal researchers to resources for finding judicial ...
Why and How: Using the Case Study Method in the Law Classroom
While we have not yet seen a study on the efficacy of the case study method vs. the Langdell method in law schools, research from political science professor Matthew Krain suggests that case studies and problem-based activities do enhance certain types of learning over other types of pedagogy. In his investigation, Krain compared the results of ...
US Laws, Cases, Codes, and Statutes
FindLaw's Cases and Codes section contains resources and links for both state and federal laws. This includes resources pertaining to constitutions, statutes, cases and more. Run a search for case summaries or select a jurisdiction to browse applicable laws. For additional primary sources and articles on legal practice visit our Professional ...
Case Studies
The Stanford Law School Case Studies Collection is an exciting innovation in law school teaching designed to hone students' problem-solving skills and stimulate creativity. The Collection includes situational case studies and interactive simulations (collectively referred to as "Case Materials") that place students in the roles of lawyers ...
Case Law
FindLaw provides a database of case law from the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal, as well as several state supreme courts. It includes U.S. Supreme Court Opinions, U.S. Federal Appellate Court Opinions and U.S. State Supreme, Appellate and Trial Court Opinions. Search for case summaries or by jurisdiction. FindLaw provides ...
The essential cases every law student should know
From the longest case in English legal history to Lord Denning's rulings, judicial decisions are a law student's bread and butter. Cases capture human stories, shape public debate and establish ...
Artificial Intelligence and the Law
As part of that work, a groundbreaking Rhode Center study offered the first rigorous evidence on legal innovation in Utah and Arizona, the first two states to implement significant reforms. ... It also offered up imaginary case law and phone numbers of nonexistent legal aid groups. In her policy lab class, AI for Legal Help, which began last ...
A Comprehensive Guide: Where to Find Law Case Studies for Research
In this comprehensive guide, we will explore various avenues for accessing law case studies online, ensuring that you have the tools needed to conduct thorough legal research. 1. Official Court Websites: One of the most reliable sources for law case studies are the official websites of courts. These websites typically provide access to opinions ...
About Harvard Law Case Studies
These case studies expose participants to real-world problems that lawyers and firm leaders confront, and help them work through possible approaches and solutions. CDI was founded by Professor Ashish Nanda and is now directed by Dr. Lisa Rohrer. Great for: discussion-based case studies, law and business, management, professional development.
Textbooks as Markers and Makers of International Law: A Brazilian Case
1 Introduction. Textbooks are sites for power and discipline making, 'engines of sociomental control that delimit the realm of the "relevant" in international law'. 1 Yet they receive limited attention as scholarship. Cast as training tools that, by virtue of their genre, do not encapsulate original insights, we tend to miss how their comprehensiveness in fact paints a broad and ...
30 Important Case Laws/ Judgements on RTI
30 Important Case Law/ Judgements on RTI OR Information Law. Central Public Information Officer, Supreme Court of India vs. Subhash Chandra Agarwal, 2020. Facts of the Case. Held. UPSC v. Angesh Kumar, AIR 2018. N N Dhumane v. PIO, Department of Post, 2018. Facts of the case.
Free Law Case Study Samples and Examples List
An case study examples on law is a prosaic composition of a small volume and free composition, expressing individual impressions and thoughts on a specific occasion or issue and obviously not claiming a definitive or exhaustive interpretation of the subject. the presence of a specific topic or question. A work devoted to the analysis of a wide ...
2024: Alan Bogg Supreme Court Labour Law Case
Success for Professor Alan Bogg and UNITE's legal team in landmark UK Supreme Court Labour Law Case. Press release issued: 23 April 2024. ... Embracing a wide range of methodological approaches to the study of law at work, the Centre's members academics combine internationally-recognised research profiles with a wealth of experience working ...
Law Cases & Legal Case Studies
Case Studies Sort by A - Z Sort by Date. ... Law Senate (LS) does not warrant that the information contained on this website is accurate or complete, and hereby disclaims any and all liability to any person for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident or any other cause. ...
Upcoming SCOTUS Case Could Weaken the Impact of Regulation on Key ...
Chevron deference is a legal framework, or test, derived from the 1984 U.S. Supreme Court case Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. that found that when an aspect of a ...
Free Materials
The Case Study Teaching Method; Harvard Law Case Studies A-Z; Free Materials; Blog; Shop By Category; Harvard Law Case Studies A-Z; Free Materials; Program; Role Play; Workshop-Based Case Study; Discussion-Based Case Study; DVD; Subject; Sabrineh Ardalan; Sharon Block; Robert Bordone; Emily M. Broad Leib; Chad Carr; Robert Clark; John Coates ...
A Comparative Analysis Between the Customary and Islamic Laws of
The law rule of male primogeniture (customary law of succession) was found to be unconstitutional in Bhe and Others v The Magistrate Khayelitsha and Others (Bhe) based on it unfairly discriminating against females. ... A SOUTH AFRICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW CASE STUDY @article{Abduroaf2023ACA, title={A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS BETWEEN THE CUSTOMARY AND ...
Best Case Study Writing Service
The ordering process is fully online, and it goes as follows: • Select the topic and the deadline of your case study. • Provide us with any details, requirements, statements that should be emphasized or particular parts of the writing process you struggle with. • Leave the email address, where your completed order will be sent to.
Savvy Lawyers Use Legal PR to Bolster Cases
COMMENTARY. Savvy Lawyers Use Legal PR to Bolster Cases. Finding the right PR partner is key to the success of this strategic relationship. But with the right match, legal PR can add great value ...
Frontiers
In recent years, changing environmental, developmental activity, government policies and laws, lifestyle changes and affordability dynamics have continued to threaten the self-determination and food sovereignty of Indigenous peoples in the community. Their perspectives, teachings, and voices are rarely present in any scholarly work.
What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S
The U.S. gun death rate was 10.6 per 100,000 people in 2016, the most recent year in the study, which used a somewhat different methodology from the CDC. That was far higher than in countries such as Canada (2.1 per 100,000) and Australia (1.0), as well as European nations such as France (2.7), Germany (0.9) and Spain (0.6).

Online Courses and Casebooks

Contract Law: From Trust to Promise to Contract

Financial Analysis and Valuation for Lawyers

Bioethics: The Law, Medicine, and Ethics of Reproductive Technologies and Genetics

Justice Today: Money, Markets, and Morals

Introduction to American Civics

HLS Executive Education Online Programs

International Finance: Policy, Regulation, and Transactions

Additional Online Resources

Open Casebook

Looking for more options?

Executive Education Programs

US Case Law

US Federal Courts

Opinions From the US Federal Courts of Appeals

State Courts

Library electronic resources outage May 29th and 30th

Case Law Research Guide

Key to Icons

Basic Case Citation

Parallel Citations

Williams Library Reference

Reference Desk : Atrium, 2nd (Main) Floor (202) 662-9140 Request a Research Consultation

Update History

How Do Great Leaders Overcome Adversity?

Why Companies Should Share Their DEI Data (Even When It’s Unflattering)

How to Make AI 'Forget' All the Private Data It Shouldn't Have

In Empowering Black Voters, Did a Landmark Law Stir White Angst?

The PGA Tour and LIV Golf Merger: Competition vs. Cooperation

The Opioid Crisis, CEO Pay, and Shareholder Activism

Good Companies Commit Crimes, But Great Leaders Can Prevent Them

How Will Gamers and Investors Respond to Microsoft’s Acquisition of Activision Blizzard?

Can You Buy Creativity in the Gig Economy?

Firing McDonald’s Easterbrook: What Could the Board Have Done Differently?

How Much Is Freedom Worth? For Gig Workers, a Lot.

The Trial of Elizabeth Holmes: Visionary, Criminal, or Both?

Why White-Collar Crime Spiked in America After 9/11

Examining Race and Mass Incarceration in the United States

Bankruptcy and the COVID-19 Crisis

Why Investors Often Lose When They Sue Their Financial Adviser

Weak Credit Covenants

Product Disasters Can Be Fertile Ground for Innovation

Should Non-Compete Clauses Be Abolished?

Investor Lawsuits Against Auditors Are Falling, and That's Bad News for Capital Markets

Why and How: Using the Case Study Method in the Law Classroom

Share this:

About Lisa Brem

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Follow HLS Case Studies

Recent Posts

Top Posts & Pages

Legal Research

Case Law Resources

State Courts

US Supreme Court

The essential cases every law student should know

Care for thy neighbour:

Foreign detainees

Spanish fisherman

Jodie and Mary

Domestic abuse

The internet age

Any of Denning's cases

Comments (…)

Artificial Intelligence and the Law

Article Contents

Textbooks as Markers and Makers of International Law: A Brazilian Case Study

B Sources Used

3 Secondary Sources

A ‘Universalism’ versus ‘Particularism’

B Between Technique and (Overt) Politics: Textbooks as Projects or Instruments

1 ‘Project’ Textbooks

2 Textbooks as ‘Technical Tools’: The ‘Instrument’ Textbooks

C The Brazilian ‘Invisible College’

1 Academic Background and Academic Affiliation

2 Professional Background: Relationship between Academia and Practice?

3 Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation: A Complex Relationship

4 Social Networks, Spaces for the Exchange of Ideas and Building Prestige through Textbooks

Email alerts

Affiliations