About

Jide Okechuku Nzelibe is the Howard and Elizabeth Chapman Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and affiliated faculty at the Ford Motor Company Center for Global Citizenship. He joined Northwestern's faculty as an assistant professor in 2004 and became a full professor in 2008. Prior to his tenure at Northwestern, he served as the Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago. Nzelibe holds a JD from Yale Law School, an MPA in international relations from Princeton University, where he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Foundation fellowship and a Ford Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship. His research and teaching interests include international trade, foreign relations law, public and private international law, and contracts. Nzelibe has contributed to the academic discourse through numerous publications and is recognized for his expertise in international business transactions, foreign relations, and international law.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Law
• Law and economics
• Political economy
• Psychology

Selected publications

• The Reliance Interest in Foreign Affairs

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Presidential Constraint of Agencies in Foreign Affairs

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Mixed Stakes Conflicts in International and Constitutional Law

  2021-04-16

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In international and constitutional law, high stakes conflicts over sacred values and social identity tend to be viewed as the most difficult and intractable, while conflicts over material resources are usually considered more manageable. This Article suggests a contrary view: it is often those legal and political conflicts that implicate an even mix of both social identity and more mundane material stakes that are likely going to be the most destabilizing. First, in such mixed stakes conflicts, the protagonists are more likely to have inconsistent beliefs about what it is stake, and thus are less likely to agree about how to resolve them. By contrast, in particularly high stakes and polarizing conflicts over only social identity, moral values, or status, the protagonists will tend to be mutually aware of the dangers of a breakdown of the system, and are more likely to search for coping solutions. Second, political actors in mixed stakes conflicts have more leeway to manipulate the legal boundaries between the sacred and the mundane for political and economic gain. Finally, this Article suggests that mixed stakes conflicts may present significant barriers to efforts to compensate groups who have been harmed by economic globalization. When groups are divided sharply along social identity as well as economic lines, they are likely to be less willing to demonstrate solidarity towards each other. These general theoretical points are illustrated by reference to legal disputes over international trade, federalism, and civil rights in the United States.

• Can the Fourth Restatement of Foreign Relations Law Foster Legal Stability?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• American Identity Politics and International Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Can the Fourth Restatement of Foreign Relations Law Foster Legal Stability?

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Law

  Abstract This chapter examines whether the kind of legal stability one may expect the Fourth Restatement of Foreign Relations to foster is even feasible, and if it is, whether it is desirable. It makes two key points. First, in the current political climate, the objective of fostering legal stability in foreign relations law may no longer be as feasible as it once was. For much of the postwar era until the administration of President George W. Bush, various commentators have suggested that even though there were occasional partisan skirmishes, a relatively bipartisan consensus on liberal internationalism prevailed. However, today, the conditions that produced that moderate bipartisan consensus no longer hold, and thus the quest to foster stability in foreign relations law is likely to face even more of an uphill battle. Second, while the Fourth Restatement may occasionally foster stability in foreign relations law, there is also the possibility that it may do so in undesirable circumstances. This point assumes that whereas too little legal stability can sometimes be disruptive, too much of it could be inhibiting.

  PublisherDOI

• American Identity Politics and International Law

  Columbia journal of transnational law · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  It has long been conventional in our public discourse to assume that special interest groups play a destabilizing role in shaping international law. In the United States, commentators are quick to point to a solution: increase transparency and try to engage the larger voting public regarding the moral and economic merits of legal globalization. This Article argues the opposite: if the American experience with international trade controversies is any guide, appeals to mass politics all too often give rise to moral inflation, which is likely to increase the role of identity politics in international law and render beneficial and durable bargains more difficult. The problem is that when economic and cultural cleavages happen to overlap, as they often do in the United States, disagreements over relatively mundane and technical issues between narrow groups in international law can sometimes be converted into high stakes contests over social identity that divide wide swaths of the population into rival camps. To illustrate these claims, this Article uses the recent controversy over the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the American experience with tariff disputes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  Publisher

• Appearing Unbiased about Presidential War Powers

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2018-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Appearing Unbiased About Presidential War Powers

  UST Research Online (University of St. Thomas - Minnesota) · 2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the United States, we assume that political actors will generally tend to be biased in favor of expanding the scope of their constitutional authority. Thus, if one witnesses public officials making declarations against constitutional self-interest, it seems reasonable to give those declarations extra weight as reflecting the true scope of that official’s actual constitutional authority. For instance, if President Trump disavows that he has the constitutional authority to engage in certain kinds of immigration enforcement, we assume that it must be because he really lacks that authority. Or when President Obama insisted in 2015 that Congress had to take a greater role in any military actions against Syria, one might reasonably conjecture that it must be because his own authority to act unilaterally was genuinely constrained. In this essay, I suggest that politicians may manipulate the appearance of being unbiased about their constitutional authority in order to achieve partisan objectives. For instance, when a president disavows that he has constitutional authority to accomplish certain goals, he or she may be simply laying the foundation to constrain the authority of future presidents who may have different policy preferences. Alternatively, the president may simply be seeking to constrain executive branch authority on those particular issues in which he or she believes the political opposition have an advantage. Thus, political actors may have significant wiggle room to manipulate the appearance of not being biased about their constitutional authority in order to further partisan goals. In sum, one ought to be cautious about taking constitutional declarations against self-interest at face value.

  Publisher

• The Breakdown of International Treaties

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• John Yoo

  Hoover Institution

  3 shared

• Matthew C. Stephenson

  2 shared

• Julian Ku

  2 shared

• Máximo Langer

  1 shared

• Anna Gelpern

  Georgetown University

  1 shared

• Jason Webb Yackee

  1 shared

• Lesley Wexler

  Chicago Kent College of Law

  1 shared

• Jeffrey L. Dunoff

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Benjamin Mazur Summer Research Professor of Law, Northwester…