International law provides a rich body of legal norms and judicial precedent that affected individuals and communities can use to understand, articulate, and protect their rights—not just in international courts, but in a variety of local and national courts as well as international agencies, policy bodies, and public forums such as awareness campaigns.

Forum Nobis is at the forefront of efforts to leverage the often under-appreciated tools of international law to help clients achieve meaningful results and social justice outcomes in a timely manner.  The firm offers clients a unique combination of first-rate international legal expertise with a creative, results-oriented style of legal representation and problem-solving.

One of the firm’s strengths is its ability to draw norms and legal precedent from a wide body of international legal authority including but beyond the realm of international human rights law—from multilateral agreements on various subject matters (e.g., transboundary movement of hazardous waste, use of environmental impact assessments, public access to information, intellectual property protection, and many others), to bilateral agreements (e.g., on trade, commerce, energy, security, and other cooperation issues), to international institution norms and mechanisms (e.g., the UN agencies, the ILO, the World Bank, the OECD), to extraterritorial domestic law, such as anti-corruption legislation.  The firm also has a strong command of the important norms and principles found in customary international law.

International law plays a particularly important role in understanding and adjudicating the rights of indigenous peoples—a rapidly-developing area of the law that Forum Nobis has worked extensively in for over a decade.  Forum Nobis also has extensive experience raising issues of human rights and environmental impact in international investment arbitration proceedings, including on behalf of individuals and communities who do not formally have a voice in those proceedings.

The core of Forum Nobis’ international law work, however, is the firm’s ability to put the tools and resources of international law to effective use in the national-level legal proceedings, policy debates, and public opinion dialogues that typically have the most direct impact on affected individuals and communities.  Through its counsel, consulting, and communications practices, Forum Nobis is available to advise affected individuals and communities (and/or their existing legal teams) on international law issues such as:

• international jurisdiction (including universal jurisdiction), personal jurisdiction, international comity issues;
• international and comparative choice-of-law/conflict-of-law analysis;
• forum non conveniens;
• immunity and justiciability doctrines (political question doctrine; sovereign immunity (FSIA); act of State doctrine; justiciability of human rights generally);
• domestic application human rights treaties and other international instruments;
• extraterritorial application of domestic law;
• corporate liability under international law and other common corporate accountability issues;
• the international judgment recognition and enforcement process;
• comparative law analysis;
• international treaty and customary international law issues.

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