Fraudulent Evidence before Public International Tribunals: The Dirty Stories of International Law—A Book by Professor W. Michael Reisman and Christina Parajon Skinner

A new book by W. Michael Reisman ’64 LLM, ’65 JSD, the Myres S. McDougal Professor of International Law, and Christina Parajon Skinner ’10 examines the complicated role of public international lawyers, whose loyalties are often torn between their duties to the state they represent and the demands of international law.

Fraudulent Evidence before Public International Tribunals: The Dirty Stories of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014) analyzes eight important cases that provide examples of fraudulent evidence brought before public international courts and tribunals.

As the stakes increase for the state represented by the public international lawyer, the growing tension between these loyalties can lead to practices that would be condemned in developed national legal systems but have hitherto been ignored by international tribunals in international legal scholarship.

With detail and contextualization, the authors attempt to clarify the reasons for the intractability of the problem in the context of international politics, and work toward a range of possible solutions.

While the authors admit in the preface that they "have no 'magic bullet' to defeat the practice of fraudulent evidence practiced on international courts and tribunals," they present their work in the hope that their analysis "will provoke a more intense demand for clarifying the responsibility of counsel, for effectively policing and sanctioning the use of fraudulent evidence in public international tribunals, and in particular, for expanding the powers of international courts and tribunals to deal with it."

W. Michael Reisman ’64 LLM, ’65 JSD is Myres S. McDougal Professor of International Law at Yale Law School where he has been on the faculty since 1965. He has been a visiting professor in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Berlin, Basel, Paris and Geneva. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and a former member of its Executive Council, a member of the Advisory Committee on International Law of the Department of State, President of the Arbitration Tribunal of the Bank for International Settlements and a member of the Board of The Foreign Policy Association. He has been elected to the Institut de Droit International and is Honorary Professor in City University of Hong Kong. He was President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, Vice-President and Honorary Vice-President of the American Society of International Law, Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law and Vice-Chairman of the Policy Sciences Center, Inc. He has served as arbitrator and counsel in many international investment cases and was presiding arbitrator in the OSPAR arbitration (Ireland v. UK) and arbitrator in the Eritrea/Ethiopia Boundary Dispute and in the Abyei (Sudan) Boundary Dispute.

Christina Parajon Skinner is an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2010, where she was Executive Editor of The Yale Law Journal and a Senior Editor of the Yale Journal of International Law. She has clerked for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Barbara S. Jones of the Southern District of New York. After her clerkships she was an associate at Zuckerman Spaeder LLP, where she practiced general litigation and represented foreign entities in commercial disputes and individual defendants in criminal matters. She also served as Counsel to the New York State White Collar Crime Task force. Her current research focuses on the private and public aspects of international economic and commercial law, with a particular emphasis on the interplay of international economic institutions and U.S. domestic law.