09
Oct
LJIL Symposium Vol 25-3: Wording in International Law: Not really a ‘hen house’: dynamics of competition amidst fears of oblivion
[Francesco Messineo is a Lecturer in Law, Kent Law School, Canterbury (UK).] This post is part of the Leiden Journal of International Law Vol 25-3 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below.
Unless international lawyers get their act together and agree on the basic meaning of the key terms in their discipline, says Jean d’Aspremont, observers (and, crucially, funders) may suddenly realize that the profession is really no more than an ‘expensive debating club’ – often funded by the taxpayer – ‘in which everyone talks past each other’. Thanks also to blogs such as Opinio Juris, access to the debating chamber is no longer subject to hierarchical initiation rituals: anyone with a higher degree in (international) law is at least ostensibly welcome to join in. The ensuing competition for credibility is rife, says d’Aspremont. An ever‑increasing mass of ‘young’ and often ‘arrogant’ scholars employ words as their tools in a ‘hen house’ of ‘violent’ conflict aimed at finding new ‘names’ for things which often already have perfectly usable ones. Because of the death of Aristotelian logic and other ‘foundational’ philosophies, the main aim of the profession has become the establishing of one’s persuasiveness and authority at the expense of the nearest colleague, often in pursuit of one’s ‘unquenchable thirst for recognition’. In order to perpetuate the illusion of a fruitful debate, the meaning of words must constantly change – there is no ‘epistemic peace’, as d’Aspremont puts it. Forget great systems of conceptual beauty collectively built by cohesive schools of thought: we want tenure, and possibly glory, too. In d’Aspremont’s view, international legal academia has become an endless game where the angst of oblivion often trumps logic and courtesy. Furthermore, this constant renaming of the institutions of international law is fashionable but pointless. As in the Leopard, everything must change constantly so that nothing actually changes.
The preceding paragraph is meant to be an example of what d’Aspremont chastises. I have deliberately simplified and exaggerated his argument. I have taken his words out of context and reduced an eloquent set of arguments to what may be perceived as a rant (which his article is not). To make things worse, I have then added a perfectly unnecessary reference to a work of literary fiction which may be obscure to some of my readers, dropping it there as if everyone should know what the Leopard is (D’Aspremont would diagnose this somewhere in the spectrum between a pointless display of ‘erudition’ and a ‘strategy’ of mild ‘intimidation’). After having created this aesthetically and rhetorically pleasing straw-man, I should now proceed to mercilessly criticise his argument – a short critique is, after all, what the kind editors of LJIL and Opinio Juris asked me to write.