On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris I would like to thank Mary Ellen O’Connell having joined us this week in our second Oxford University Press/ Opinio Juris book symposium for a discussion of her new book, The Power and Purpose of International Law. We would also like to thank Beth Simmons for joining us as a guest commentor. Thanks also to everyone who posted comments...
The power of international law comes from our belief in it and the purposes it serves: the promotion of peace, human rights, prosperity and the natural environment. Beth Simmons in her thoughtful and well-written post suggests that we need empirical evidence of this belief. There is, however, plenty of evidence—indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, if not categorized and precisely quantified. We...
[caption id="attachment_5673" align="alignright" width="176" caption="Prof. Joel Trachtman"][/caption] Back in 2005 when Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner published their book, The Limits of International Law, they garnered a lot of attention for promoting the application of rational choice theory to international law (IL), and, equally importantly, suggesting that this method showed IL to have much less influence than conventional wisdom suggested. And the...
One of the most interesting jurisprudential aspects of The Power and Purpose of International Law is its explicit use of Hans Kelsen. I am among those Americans for whom Kelsen is a mostly forgotten figure in jurisprudence - and I realized reading this book that, while I have probably read much more than most American legal scholars of his jurisprudential...
The Asian Society of International Law announces the "Second Biennial General Conference of the Asian Society of International Law," at the University of Tokyo, August 1-2, 2009, which takes up the important issue of Asia’s relationship with the international legal order under the main theme of “International Law in a Multi-polar and Multi-civilizational World – Asian Perspectives, Challenges and Contributions.” The...
Despite the title of his post, I do not read Chris Borgen as a natural law skeptic! He accepts the existence of norms and principles that must be explained by theories other than positivism. He is just skeptical about the standard approach to explaining the source of natural law, namely, the use of the concept of the common...
At risk of distracting us too soon from the merits vel non of natural law, I wanted to take up another piece of Mary Ellen’s account – namely, her fairly positive outlook on the prospects of domestic court enforcement of international law. Despite the subject matter’s placement in the very last chapter of the book, Mary Ellen I think rightly notes:...
In working through an explanation for the source of international law’s authority in the international community, Mary Ellen O’Connell describes the important role of positive law but also shows its limits. For example, it is very hard to imagine a serious contention that it is somehow possible to legalize genocide or slavery through the mere fact of enacting positive law....
Julien fell asleep, dreaming of honors for himself and human rights for everyone else. (The Red and the Black, vol 2, chapter 39, 'The Ball'. The translation is a little loose, but captures the contemporary sense pretty well, wouldn't you say? More traditionally: "Julien fell asleep, dreaming of honors for himself and liberty for everyone else." The original ...
The State Department has posted John Bellinger's recent speech at the Fletcher School on international criminal justice. It is well worth a read, because it quite rightly highlights the US's many important contributions -- past and present -- to international criminal justice. That said, the speech regrettably dusts off all of the US's tired objections to the ICC: not giving...
In case you're tired of stodgy old international law, you might want to check out a new blog written by Jay Wexler, a professor at B.U., a leading law and religion scholar, and -- far more importantly -- a friend of mine from law school. I've tried to think of how to capture the cleverness of Jay's writing, but for...
Many of us who are law professors know Matthew Evangelista, who teaches in the government department at Cornell. I have just finished reading his Law, Ethics, and the War on Terror (Polity 2008). I teach a seminar on Just War Theory and ethics of war, so this is both professionally and pedagogically important for me. Evangelista is a graceful writer,...
