Steven R. Ratner
About/Bio
Steven R. Ratner is the Bruno Simma Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. His teaching and research focus on public international law and on a range of challenges facing governments and international institutions since the Cold War, including ethnic conflict, border disputes, counter-terrorism strategies, corporate and state duties regarding foreign investment, and accountability for human rights violations.
Recently Published
Beyond Courtroom Arguments: Why International Lawyers Need to Focus More on Persuasion, Part II
September 11, 2013
Steven R. Ratner
In my last post, I noted several gaps in the literature on legal persuasion, notably the reasons actors make legal arguments, the forms those arguments take, and their effectiveness. In this post, I want to express a few views on the first two of these questions, based on research that reflects my experience in-house at…
Beyond Courtroom Arguments: Why International Lawyers Need to Focus More on Persuasion, Part I
September 10, 2013
Steven R. Ratner
Steven Ratner is the Bruno Simma Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Persuasion is at the heart of the lawyer’s – including the international lawyer’s – task. The lawyer may be persuading a decisionmaker of the merits of her client’s case; or persuading another party, or even her own…
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Popular articles by Steven R. Ratner
Introducing The Thin Justice of International Law
June 1, 2015
Steven R. Ratner
I begin with thanks to the editors of the two blogs that have organized this mini-symposium and to the five authors, from ethics and international law, who have agreed to comment on my book. I hope this experiment in interdisciplinary blogging will be the start of something bigger. The project that eventually became The Thin Justice…
Introducing David Lefkowitz’s Philosophy and International Law
David Lefkowitz’s new book Philosophy and International Law: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2020) comes at a critical time in the conversation between international law scholars and practitioners, on the one hand, and philosophers, whether legal, moral, or political, on the other. More dialogue among scholars of international law and philosophy Until about fifteen years…
New Options for Investor Accountability in ISDS
ISDS emerged in the twentieth century to empower foreign investors to assert legal claims against host states without the intervention of their home state. But this understanding of international investment law (IIL) – investor rights and host state duties – is now a relic of the past. Yet because of their current asymmetrical nature, ISDS and IIL do…