The Fate of Public International Law: Between Technique and Politics
Koskenniemi, Martti
The Modern Law Review 70, no. 1 (2007): 1-30
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2006.00624.x
“Public international law is rules and institutions but it is also a tradition and a political project. If you view it only as rules or institutions, you will be struck by how different it looks from the rules and institutions you know from the domestic context. Of course, there was always the suspicion that what international lawyers do is not like domestic attorneys or judges reading dossiers, interviewing clients or handing out decisions. Compared with the sophisticated techniques of domestic law, international law seemed primitive, abstract and above all political, too political. It was against this attitude that international lawyers have defended heir project by seeking to show that, despite appearances, it is not really so different. States could, after all, be conceived as legal subjects in a system where their territorial possessions were like property, their treaties like contracts and their diplomacy like the administration of a legal system.1 That strategy was quite successful. However, I would like to suggest that the problems faced by public international law today—marginalization, lack of normative force, a sense that the diplomatic mores that stand at its heart are part of the world’s problems—result in large part from that strategy, the effort of becoming technical.”
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Koskenniemi, Martti
The Modern Law Review 70, no. 1 (2007): 1-30
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2006.00624.x