Editors' note.

• Author: Christensen, Erik

On behalf of the Executive Board and editorial staff, we are pleased to present volume 44.1 of the Stanford Journal of International Law. The articles published in this issue reflect the wide-ranging nature of contemporary international law scholarship, from a comparison of sentencing practices in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, to a survey of the rule of law in Chinese history, to a proposal for broadening the class of recipients of treaty rights. This issue concludes with a student note--a note that the Stanford faculty awarded the Carl Mason Franklin Prize for best paper in international law--that examines the response to rape and violence against women in Haiti.

Judge Ines Monica Weinberg de Roca and Christopher Rassi begin this issue with their article Sentencing and Incarceration in the Ad Hoc Tribunals. Their work compares the sentencing practices of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and highlights a number of differences in sentencing between the two tribunals. The article offers two sources for such a divergence in sentencing practices: judicial discretion and the post-incarceration practices of countries holding prisoners convicted by the two tribunals. The article concludes that, while there are differences in the sentences handed down by the two tribunals, those differences are more attributable to differences in post-incarceration practices than judicial discretion. The article concludes by considering a proposal for uniformity in sentencing practices through a set of rules and customs for detention.

Professor Sital Kalantry of Cornell Law School offers a new approach to determining when treaties grant litigants enforceable rights against federal and state governments in her article The Intent-to-Benefit: Individually Enforceable Rights under International Treaties. While courts have not consistently applied a single test to determine when a treaty grants foreign citizens and other litigants an enforceable right, courts often apply a textualist methodology adopted from the principles of statutory interpretation. Professor Kalantry argues that this approach is misguided for three reasons. First, the question of when a treaty grants enforceable rights to someone who is not a direct signatory of the treaty bears a closer similarity to the question of when a person who is...