Walking Down Memory Lane on the 50th Anniversary of YJIL

YJIL Online - Then and Now

List of Timeline Entries

2009

Fall YJIL Online debuts, featuring articles by Harold Hongju Koh, Aaron Zelinsky, W. Michael Reisman, Bradley T. Tennis, Gwen Hinze, and Eddan Katz.  See Archive in HeinOnline. The inaugural online issue accompanying YJIL's Vol. 35(1) intended to stay "committed to publishing cutting-edge, provocative, and thoughtful scholarship at the forefront of international, transnational, and comparative law. Short, timely Essays between 3,000 and 4,000 words are edited and published on a rolling basis."

2016

The YJIL Online Forum debuts, stating that "[t]he main goal of YJIL Forum is to foster a dynamic exchange between members of the international law community. Forum pieces are shorter and published more frequently than our Features Essays."

2017

The YJIL Online featured Spring Symposium: BREXIT and the Law, with an introduction by professor Harold Hongju Koh, which "offers three thoughtful investigations into how the United Kingdom and the European Union can cope with Brexit in three intensively human areas. Exploring how Brexit will affect critical medicines, data privacy, and children seeking asylum, Kyle Edwards, Brian Mund, and Victoria Roeck investigate the problems unleashed by the proposed withdrawal from the European Union, the inadequacies of existing mechanisms to address those problems, and the need for creative and intensive negotiation to develop acceptable safety nets going forward." See Archive in HeinOnline. 

2018

In the May 2018 Symposium titled Puerto Rico and the Right of Accession, YJIL Forum featured "four responses to Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati’s Puerto Rico and the Right of Accession [article], ... published in Volume 43(2) of the Yale Journal of International Law. YJIL Forum is sincerely grateful to Judge Gelpí, Professors Delaney & Ponsa-Kraus, Dean Shin, and Professor Morales for their thought-provoking responses." See Archive in HeinOnline.

2019

In February 2019, the YJIL Forum presented the Winter Symposium Conference: International Trade Law in the Trump Era, held at Yale Law School, featuring articles by Kathleen Claussen, Rachel Brewster, Timothy Meyer, Joel P. Trachtman, Gregory Shaffer, Andrew Lang, David Singh Grewal, Chantal Thomas, Padideh Ala'i, and Harold Koh, who grappeled with consequestional questions of the future of the established order of international trade, the role of WTO, and the trade war with China. Submissions are published in the 2018-2019, Vol. 44, YJIL Online Issue. See Archive in HeinOnline. 

2020

In the midst of the pandemic, the YJIL Online co-hosted, in its first-ever collaboration with Harvard Journal of International Law, Oxford China Centre, and the Yale Journal of International Law, a Fall Joint Symposium: China and the International Legal Order on October 15, 2020. With COVID-19 raging the world, the symposium focused on: "How does an increasingly active China position itself within the ILO [international legal order]? Is China a revisionist state that seeks to conform this order to its own values, is it building an alternative order, or does it seek to operate within the status quo? What, in short, is the future of this order, particularly after Covid-19?" See Archive in HeinOnline, Volume 46 (Winter 2021). 

2022

Spring Symposium: Managing Mixed Migration featured a collection of essayes that "survey[ed] the law, politics, and history of mixed migration. They reveal how states have interpreted the term and showcase the promise and perils of migrant categorization. Above all, they tell a story about how governments rely on the mixed character of migrant flows and the mixed motives of people on the move to draw categories, force emigration, and constrain immigration." See Archive in HeinOnline. 

2023

In collaboration with Law and Political Economy Project (LPE), YJIL hosted a Spring Symposium titled Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and Economic Sanctions. At that time, the Journal writes "[t]his critical discussion about sanctions could not be more pressing: since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War in February 2022, the United States and its allies have deployed economic sanctions as their primary responses to Russia’s serious violations of international law. Proponents of sanctions hail the measures as a “non-violent” alternative to military action that can serve as an effective tool for enforcing international law. But the idea that sanctions provide a simple, peaceful tool for law enforcement papers over their often devastating political, economic, and social impacts." 

The symposium, featuring, among others, the work of Yale professor Aslı Ü. Bâli, provided "a clarion call for international law scholars, practitioners, and members of civil society (particularly from countries of the Global North that use their power to impose sanctions on economically weaker states) to interrogate the dominant discourse presenting sanctions as nonviolent tools for international law enforcement. ... [inviting] readers to think critically about the impacts of sanctions on target countries, war, and efforts to strengthen international law and justice." See Archive in HeinOnline. f020timely Essays between 3,000 and 4,000 words are edited and published on a rolling basis.”