PhD conferral Henrique Jerônimo Bezerra Marcos

Keywords: international law as a legal system, fragmentation of international law, rule consistency and rule conflicts, legal logic

"Consistency in International Law: How to Make Sense of a Decentralised and Expansive Rule-Based World"

How do countries make and follow the rules of international law? Unlike domestic law, there is no central authority that decides what the rules are and how they should be enforced. Countries can sign treaties with each other, but what if these treaties clash? How can they know what to do when they face such a legal dilemma?

In his PhD dissertation, Henrique Marcos offers a framework to help countries avoid and resolve conflicts of international law. He argues that more rules are not always a bad thing, as long as they are the right kind of rules that can prevent or reduce conflicts. He also suggests that countries can weigh the reasons for and against different rules to determine what rules apply and what outcomes these rules lead to.

His dissertation contributes to the field of international law by providing a novel and practical way of dealing with one of its most challenging problems: how to make sense of conflicting rules in a decentralised system.

Language: English

Click here for the full dissertation.

Click here for the live stream.