Defending the American Way of Teaching International Law

In Jose Alvarez’s president’s column this month over at the ASIL website, Jeff Dunoff, Steve Ratner, and David Wippman defend their leading casebook against French charges that American approaches to international law are too realist, too interdisciplinary, and too US-centric. I think their arguments are pretty persuasive. US policy may not lately have had much to offer to the advancement of international law, but I think new American IL methodologies will make an important contribution to its long-term effectiveness.

Here’s how Jeff, Steve, and David put it, with respect to interdisciplinarity:

[W]e think that interdisciplinary materials, particularly the feminist and other critical materials that we include, can help students identify international law’s limitations, blind spots, and biases. An international law casebook should not be a polemic for the existence or efficacy of international law. Rather, it should empower students to enter the field with a sense of the discipline’s range and reach, its possibilities and limits. Whether in practice or the academy, whether working on particular legal issues or generating broad new proposals designed to transform the field as a whole, familiarity with interdisciplinary materials and approaches can help attorneys recognize the (often unacknowledged) assumptions that underlie certain arguments, texts and doctrines, and generate alternative arguments. In short, our book uses interdisciplinary materials because they can enhance an international lawyer’s understanding and effectiveness.

Perhaps a US-centric approach facilitates this critical perspective. The powerful anti-internationalist tradition here forces us to ground our explanations in a way that might not be necessary in more IL-friendly environments. Formalist premises just won’t do.

Europeans appear to be adopting those methodologies in their scholarship (though perhaps the French less than others), and replicating our community structures. I don’t know if American pedagogical approaches have also insinuated themselves, but I imagine Europe might profit from them as well.