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Send back the Lifeboats: Confronting the Project of Saving International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Jean d’Aspremont*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester University of Amsterdam

Extract

The idea that international law is in crisis—needing the inspired thinking and skilled practice of many kinds of international lawyers to save it—has a rich history in those countries where the enterprise of international law has been most deeply established and embraced. Unsurprisingly, saving international law remains a project shared by many twenty-first-century international lawyers. Such a commitment is certainly not confined to legal academics. Even some legal advisers, counsel, judges, and activists think of themselves as having a role to play in rescuing international law. Being a disengaged bystander while grave hazards supposedly threaten international law has not seemed to be a proper option for many of these professionals who share a calling for heroic self-sacrifice to salvage the ostensibly endangered entity of international law.

Type
Agora: Reflections on Anthony D’Amato’s “Groundwork for International Law”
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2014

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References

1 E.g., Charlesworth, Hilary, International Law: A Discipline of Crisis, 65 Mod. L. Rev. 377 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Orford, Anne, The Destiny of International Law, 17 Leiden J. Int’l L. 441, 443 (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 The idea that international law has failed and needs to be saved from its own failure dates back to at least the post-World War I scholarship. See generally Desautels-Stein, Justin, Chiastic Law in the Crystal Ball: Exploring Legal Formalism and Its Alternative Futures, 2 London Rev. Int’l L. 263 (2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 Id. at 652. For a different attempt to move away from consent in the theory of sources, see Klabbers, Jan, The Concept of Treaty in International Law 245–50 (1996)Google Scholar; D’Aspremont, supra note 3, at 185 (arguing that consent should no longer be considered the primary treaty-ascertainment criterion).

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32 This analysis is nothing groundbreaking in itself. It has been argued that realism made the interdisciplinary study of law respectable. See Neil Duxbury, Patterns of American Jurisprudence 92 (1997).

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34 For some critical remarks on such a move, see Rosenberg, supra note 31, at 295 (“[I]t is too easy to tailor a theory to be consistent with data that are already in.”).

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37 This dimension has been thoroughly explored in Marxist economic theory whereby overaccumulation leads to crisis, which is a moment of destruction, allowing the system to find alternative avenues for the overaccumulated capital.

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51 Benvenisti, supra note 16, at 43 (“The systemic vision of international law suited an evolving and meandering legal order because it provided room for both continuity and change: continuity of the basic principles like sovereignty and the doctrine of sources, and change though opportunities for state actors to adjust specific norms by practice or consent and an opportunity for judges to assert changes in the law through adjudication.”).

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66 See generally Peters, Anne, Realizing Utopia as a Scholarly Endeavor, 24 Eur. J. Int’l L. 533 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (stating that scholarship is all about the generation of theories to reduce complexity).

67 Jean d’Aspremont, “Effectivity” in International Law: Self-Empowerment Against Epistemological Claustrophobia, AJIL Unbound (June 20, 2014), at http://www.asil.org/blogs/”effectively”-international-law-self-empowerment-against epistemological-claustrophobia (projecting international law’s complex categories on the external world).