Lea Brilmayer

International claims commissions have, over the last few decades, established themselves as important and permanent fixtures in international adjudication. This book provides a comprehensive review and analysis of the workings and mechanics of claims commissions to assess their success and predict their utility in the future. The book examines the legal framework of an international claims commission and the basic elements its processing procedure, as well as exploring the difficulties and challenges associated with operating costs, remedies and compliance with judgments. International claims commissions are created ad hoc to consider large numbers of complex legal claims resulting from an international upheaval, making them important international dispute resolution mechanisms. By focusing in large part on the examples set by the United Nations Claims Commissions, the Iran US Claims Tribunal, and the Eritrea Ethiopia Claims Commission, the authors assess the reasons to establish a claims commission by discussing their legal and operating structures, issues related to evidence and costs and the challenges and successes of creating them. The book concludes with a detailed analysis of lessons learnt to guide policy makers in the creation of future claims commissions. Written by two academics and a former practitioner this book is a practical resource for international law academics; counsel and judges in international courts and tribunals; policy makers in international organizations and foreign ministries, and diplomats.

Is it morally acceptable for one nation to be the world's policeman? Are there circumstances under which one nation has either the right or the obligation to dominate the others? This important and timely book is the first to examine these and other moral issues raised by America's status as the sole world superpower after the end of the Cold War.Lea Brilmayer argues that American hegemony is a form of international governance and must be evaluated by liberals in the same way they would evaluate the legitimacy of domestic political arrangements. According to Brilmayer, liberal political morality as expounded by such philosophers as Rawls and Nozick requires that those who are governed give their consent, and so this becomes the key to hegemonic legitimacy. Brilmayer discusses three ways that consent can be obtained and then shows how a further justification for hegemonic governance can be provided derived from basic universal norms of human rights. Each of these four rationales, says Brilmayer, provides a standard for assessing the legitimacy of American actions. Each also specifies that there are certain circumstances in which hegemonic intervention is not only permitted but actually required. Liberal political morality thus provides a limited justification for American hegemony, although—since liberal political morality is often criticized as misguided or irrelevant—even this limited justification is dubious.Brilmayer's book is a brilliant demonstration of the importance of normative evaluation and of the moral problems underlying the enforcement of international law.