Robert Howse is a winner of Global Policy Journal's Best Article Prize for 2010
Global Policy Journal and the Global Public Policy Network (GPPN) named Robert Howse, Lloyd C. Nelson Professor of International Law, a joint winner of its 2010 Best Article Prize. Howse and his co-author, Ruti Teitel of New York Law School and the London School of Economics, won for their piece “Beyond Compliance: Rethinking Why International Law Really Matters,” which appeared in Global Policy’s May 2010 issue. "One of the most pleasing features of receiving this prize,” Howse said, “was knowing that the board that decided the winners included some of the scholars whom I most admire and who have most influenced my own work and intellectual trajectory, for example philosopher/economist Amartya Sen, and international relations specialists John Ruggie and Bob Keohane."
Howse and Teitel’s piece shared the prize with an article by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, and physicist-turned-economist Claude Henry. On March 30, just days after learning of his award, Howse found himself linked to Stiglitz again, when both served as panelists at a conference at Columbia Law School on climate change, China, and the World Trade Organization. That relatively concrete topic, Howse says, helps illuminate the more theoretical discussion in his “Beyond Compliance” article: "One of the main thrusts of the article is that we are liable to miss many of the important effects of international law if the focus is narrowed to whether the parties to a specific treaty are in compliance with its rules. The emerging climate regime, while plagued with compliance issues, is actually shaping behavior even of states not parties to it, and affecting the way in which other areas of international law, like the global trading system, govern world markets. The dispute between the U.S. and China about green energy technologies is a great example. Its implications go beyond questions of compliance either with trade rules or with the climate regime each on its own, to how these systems interact, and how international law generally understands the challenge of 'sustainable development'."
Posted April 5, 2011