Sovereignty, self-determination, and the duty to cooperate: public international law's limits on unilateral extraterritorial regulation of non-citizens

The international law of jurisdiction limits a state’s power to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction (whether in the prescriptive, enforcement, or adjudicatory jurisdiction contexts). As those limits have been challenged and reinvented, the once well-defined norms of international law have become more amorphous. Against this backdrop, it’s helpful to remember that jurisdictional norms are also derived from public international law concepts of sovereignty, self-determination, and non-intervention. Additional long-standing foundational principles—such as the duty to negotiate and the duty to cooperate—privilege cooperative international solutions over unilateral regulation and restrict a state’s ability to act without first accounting for the interests of other states. This chapter sketches out the public international law limits on extraterritorial jurisdiction derived from sovereignty, self-determination, non-interference, and the duty to cooperate. Public international law also imposes obligations on states to avoid immediately resorting to extraterritorial self-help mechanisms that ignore the interests of other states.