International Law

This Article argues that effective national security mandates protection against the spread of infectious diseases, which requires addressing intellectual property (IP) and technology obstacles. Without modification, IP laws can bar the manufacture of needed treatments by anyone besides the IP owner and its licensees. This Article explains how usual IP norms can frustrate public health and national security, why current proposals for a pandemic agreement are largely inadequate, as well as what countries can and should do to protect national security even if there is not adequate consensus for binding obligations in an international pandemic agreement.

Past efforts to “reimagine” national security in legal scholarship have largely avoided systematic engagement with the foundational assumptions and presumptions of the field. Challenging and critiquing those assumptions is, however, necessary to producing scholarly work that reimagines, rather than reproduces, status quo approaches to U.S. national security. This Article presents an agenda for reimagining national security through legal scholarship, which is premised on the view that challenging the national security status quo should be part of those efforts. In doing so, this agenda explores seven premises central to how U.S. national security is currently conceived of, practiced, and implemented. Moving beyond the law, the agenda presented in this Article examines the structural power dynamics and political economy of national security, demonstrating why these issues are important to reimagining and transforming how we approach the discipline of national security as legal academics and advocates.

National security and cultural heritage protection are connected in several ways. This Article explores how the real or perceived relationship between threatened cultural heritage and national security developed, how this relationship has changed U.S. foreign and cultural policy, and whether these changes are for the better or the worse from a broader policy perspective, particularly with respect to the goal of cultural heritage preservation.