{"id":1793,"date":"2009-01-01T09:05:33","date_gmt":"2009-01-01T13:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/site\/?p=1793"},"modified":"2010-09-17T12:02:05","modified_gmt":"2010-09-17T16:02:05","slug":"issue_50-1_sloane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/2009\/01\/issue_50-1_sloane\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking the Genuine Link"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Abstract<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>The  concept of nationality traditionally mediated the relationship between  the individual and the state in a bygone era in which international law  regarded only the latter as a genuine subject of the law; today, its  international legal functions have expanded. Yet, as in the past, it  remains unclear whether and how international law limits the otherwise  almost plenary competence of states to confer their nationality by their  internal laws in a way entitled to international recognition. After the  International Court of Justice\u2019s (\u201cICJ\u201d) 1955 judgment in Nottebohm,  however, lawyers began to express this limit with a kind of doctrinal  mantra: a state\u2019s national, to be a bona fide national entitled to  recognition as such at the international level, must have a \u201cgenuine  link\u201d to that state. This Article critiques the genuine link theory and  proposes a functional account of nationality, which, it argues, is  descriptively more accurate and normatively more appealing. Nottebohm is  properly read as a narrow decision in which the ICJ tacitly invoked a  general principle of law, viz., abuse of rights, to prevent what it saw  as a manipulative effort by the claimant to evade a critical part of the  law of war. But whatever the merit of this revisionist reading of  Nottebohm, the genuine link theory proves anachronistic today in view of  profound changes in the manifold functions that nationality serves in  contemporary international law. To illustrate, the Article suggests that  the abuse-of-rights principle would also be more appropriate and  effective than the genuine link theory to regulate nationality in one  contemporary context that has provoked debate recently: investor-state  arbitration. But the abuse-of-rights principle is no panacea. An  atomized conception of nationality, which has been liberated from the  genuine link theory and regulated by its functions, would best serve the  policies of contemporary international law in diverse subfields.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The concept of nationality traditionally mediated the relationship between the individual and the state in a bygone era in which international law regarded only the latter as a genuine subject of the law; today, its international legal functions have 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