GLOBAL COMMON GOODS: SECURITY AND REALISM BY JONATHAN GRANOFF

The winter 2015 edition of International Law News, the publication of the American Bar Association's International Law Section, focuses on the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals, the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, which were to be developed between 2000 and 2015. In this special issue, the contributing lawyers demonstrate that the rule of law is one of the main cornerstones in the implementation of these goals. 

In his contribution to the ILN, Jonathan Granoff writes that the critical and existential threats we face in the twenty-first century require cooperation and the establishment of international legal regimes, "the pursuit of which will amplify the capacity of nations to work together and find common ground in addressing issues where current differences preclude critical short-term progress." He compares the ad hoc way by which legal regimes are emerging at the global, regional, and national level, with the far more stable intentional legal regime that regulates global commercial matters, and calls on lawyers to actively advocate for treaty regimes to protect the global common goods: stabilizing the climate, protecting the oceans and rain forests, and insuring that nuclear weapons are never used. 

Read "Global Common Goals and Goods: Security and Realism," or download the entire issue of ILN.