The World Was All Before Them: Paradise Lost and International Law After Eden

[Gustavo Leite Neves da Luz is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University. He holds a PhD in International Law from the University of Hamburg. His research focuses on public international law, the law of the sea, and international environmental law]

International law has not died. Its treaties remain in force, courts continue to decide, and institutions still organise the vocabulary through which power is exercised, resisted, and justified. Yet something has been lost. What has collapsed is not legal form itself, but the discipline’s Edenic self-image: the belief that international law could justify order from a place untouched by history, violence, hierarchy, and exclusion. For anti-colonial, post-colonial, and Third World jurists, that innocence had long been suspect. The point, then, is not that the whole world has suddenly fallen from the same paradise, but that international law can no longer plausibly inhabit the paradise it once imagined for itself. That loss is concrete. It shapes how we read sovereign equality beside the prohibition of force, human rights beside domestic jurisdiction, climate obligations beside historical responsibility, development beside trade, and the “common heritage of mankind” beside the politics of global governance. In that sense, international law now finds itself after Eden.

Milton’s Paradise Lost is useful here not because international law is theology in secular form. That would be too easy. Its value lies elsewhere: it gives us a language for thinking about order after rupture. It begins after rebellion has already taken place. Heaven has known revolt; the fallen angels have been expelled; creation unfolds against disobedience, judgment, and loss. The poem is therefore about what remains when innocence can no longer be sustained.

That is also one of the central questions of international law. The discipline still speaks in the language of peace, sovereignty, humanity, consent, civilisation, development, and the common good. But these words no longer sound as if they came from a neutral height. They have justified restraint, with domination; cooperation, with tutelage; order, with the concealment of the conditions on which order was made. This post argues that international law must now be read not as a fallen universalism to be restored, but as a discipline after innocence, whose authority depends on responsibility, participation, and historical self-knowledge.

Milton’s Problem and the Law of Nations

Milton famously announces that his poem will “justify the ways of God to men”. The ambition is not only poetic or theological; it is also juridical. The poem asks how authority may be justified after rebellion, how freedom can coexist with obedience, how punishment may be reconciled with providence, and how a created order can remain meaningful after the Fall.

The European classical archive of international law was animated by a similar anxiety. It tried to justify the ways of order to nations. Grotius’ De Jure Belli ac Pacis sought to discipline war without imagining that war could simply be abolished. Vattel’s Law of Nations treated nations as free and independent, yet still subject to duties derived from a wider normative order. Oppenheim gave doctrinal form to a law among states. Lauterpacht later defended adjudication, legal personality, and the protection of the individual against sovereignty. These writers matter because they show that international law has always been more than a catalogue of rules. It has also been a project of justification: a claim that power can be judged, war restrained, sovereignty disciplined, and relations among political communities kept from force alone.

But this archive was never the whole archive. To tell the story only through Grotius, Vattel, Oppenheim, and Lauterpacht would reproduce the very exclusion that a post-Edenic reading should resist. For much of the global majority, Eden was not a shared memory later lost, but a claim made by others. Anti-colonial and Third World jurists encountered international law through conquest, mandates, racialised standards of civilisation, dependency, and tutelage. From Bandung and self-determination to permanent sovereignty over natural resources, Bedjaoui on the New International Economic Order, Anand on new states, Elias on Africa’s contribution, and common heritage debates, they were legal authors, not merely objects of legal administration. This is also where TWAIL and post-colonial approaches matter: they do not merely add excluded voices to an existing canon, but challenge the historical conditions under which that canon came to appear universal in the first place. Nor is this only a mid-twentieth-century correction; contemporary African and Asian juristic interventions continue to reshape debates on development, climate responsibility, human rights, resource sovereignty, and the governance of the global commons.

Nonetheless, this inheritance was never innocent. The same tradition that spoke of reason, nature, civilisation, and humanity also helped organise the world through distinctions between the civilised and the uncivilised, the sovereign and the not-yet-sovereign, the trustee and the ward, the full subject of law and the object of administration. The point is not to discard the classical tradition. The point is to read it after Eden: as a conflicted archive in which the promise of law and the history of hierarchy are inseparable.

The Lost Paradise of Universal Reason

The classical law of nations often imagined that legal order could be grounded in reason. Grotius sought restraints on war that did not depend only on princes. Vattel framed national independence within a broader moral vocabulary. Oppenheim’s positivism emphasised consent and state practice, while Lauterpacht pushed against the reduction of international law to sovereign will.

This is the Edenic promise of international law: that law can stand above the disorder of politics and speak in the name of a more general reason. Even the technical grammar of sources carries traces of that ambition. But this was not everyone’s paradise. For colonised peoples and anti-colonial jurists, international law’s universal reason often appeared less as neutral grammar than as a language of admission, exclusion, and discipline. The problem is not simply that universalism failed to include everyone. It is that the universal was often constituted through exclusion. Koskenniemi’s account of international law as moving between apology and utopia helps illuminate this instability, but a post-Edenic reading also asks who was historically allowed to stand on the universal stage from which that argument was made.

Paradise Lost sharpens the analogy. To lose paradise is to acquire knowledge that cannot be undone. Adam and Eve cannot return by pretending they have not eaten. International law cannot return to universal innocence by invoking civilisation, humanity, or the international community as if these concepts had no genealogy. Universality is not always fraudulent, but it is never costless. It must answer for the exclusions through which international law learned to call itself universal.

Satan, Sovereignty, and the Ambiguity of Freedom

Milton also warns against a second temptation: the belief that revolt is innocent because order is compromised. Satan is compelling because he speaks the language of dignity, refusal, and injured freedom. He denounces subordination. He turns defeat into defiance. He makes rebellion sound like emancipation. However, this analogy requires caution: to invoke Satan’s revolt is not to equate anti-colonial resistance with rebellion against legitimate order; anti-colonial movements often saw more clearly than the discipline’s metropolitan guardians that the supposed order had itself been built through conquest, hierarchy, and tutelage.

Satan’s revolt does not abolish domination, it reproduces it. His challenge to hierarchy becomes a counter-hierarchy. His language of freedom becomes a will to rule. Pandemonium is not liberation from empire. It is empire in another register.

This ambiguity is central to international law. Sovereignty has always carried a double promise. It protects political independence, although it may shield violence. It enables self-determination, but may legitimise exclusion. It resists domination from outside, even though it may entrench domination within. The Judgement in the Lotus Case gave classic expression to one version of this freedom when it held that restrictions on the independence of states cannot be presumed. The legal order after 1945 altered that grammar without abolishing sovereignty. The UN Charter preserves sovereign equality while prohibiting the threat or use of force. Human rights law, environmental law, international criminal law, and the modern law of responsibility all push against the idea that sovereignty is merely residual liberty.

Milton helps us see why this tension cannot be resolved by rhetoric alone. The critique of hierarchy does not automatically produce justice. Multipolarity is not emancipation. Fragmentation is not pluralism. The decline of one universal language may open space for coexistence, but it may also produce rival dominations, transactional alliances, and new hierarchies dressed in anti-hegemonic language.

A post-Edenic international law must therefore be wary of both illusions: the illusion that universal order was innocent, and the illusion that every rebellion against universal order is liberating. Satan’s tragedy lies partly in his inability to imagine freedom without reproducing the logic of domination. International law faces the same risk when critique becomes only inversion.

Free to Fall, Bound to Answer

One of the most important lines in Paradise Lost appears in Book III: “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” Milton joins freedom and responsibility. The creature is not a machine. It can obey, resist, err, and fall; because it is capable of standing, the fall matters.

International law has long lived within this tension. Vattel’s sovereign is free and independent, but not free from all obligation. Grotius’ law of war recognises conflict, albeit seeking to discipline it. The UN Charter preserves sovereign equality but prohibits force. The ICJ’s jurisprudence on non-intervention, reparation, and the use of force assumes that states are agents capable of legal responsibility. Freedom is not innocence. Consent is not absolution. Sovereignty is not a moral alibi.

This is why the language of fall is more useful than the language of death. International law falls whenever it permits its concepts to be used without responsibility: humanity without equality, civilisation without self-reflection, sovereignty without accountability, development without redistribution, common heritage without participation, environmental protection without historical responsibility. The fall does not make law disappear. It forces law to answer for the conditions under which it claims authority.

That condition travels across the discipline. The prohibition of force claims general authority while being tested by selectivity. Human rights challenge domestic jurisdiction while carrying histories of tutelage. Climate law speaks of common concern while struggling with historical responsibility. Trade law promises non-discrimination while development inequalities remain structural. Each field shows the same problem: law needs general language, otherwise general language becomes dangerous when it forgets its own history.

The law of the sea makes this problem concrete. Grotius’ Mare Liberum helped make the freedom of the seas one of the classic languages of international law. Yet the ocean has also been a space of empire, extraction, forced movement, colonial commerce, naval domination, depletion, seabed ambition, and environmental vulnerability. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea tries to hold together navigational freedom, coastal-state rights, common heritage, environmental protection, marine scientific research, and institutional cooperation. The BBNJ Agreement adds another layer for biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction. It does not restore innocence. It confirms that ocean governance must work inside a plural and unequal world.

The “common heritage of mankind” sounds universal. Yet it immediately raises the old questions in new form. Who speaks for mankind? Who administers the common? Who has the technology to benefit from it? Who bears the ecological risk? Who is asked to wait, comply, or trust in distant institutions? These questions are not external to the legal regime. They are part of its post-Edenic condition.

Leaving Eden

The ending of Paradise Lost is not simple despair. Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, but they are not annihilated. They leave paradise with “the world all before them.” The image is one of loss, but also of movement. Milton opens history.

That is the right image for international law. The discipline cannot return to its former self-image. It cannot plausibly claim to speak from nowhere, above empire, above political economy, above race, above geography, above the unequal distribution of vulnerability and capacity. That claim has been lost, and rightly so.

International law must therefore justify itself without inherited innocence. Its classical sources should be treated neither as sacred scripture nor as refuse, but as part of a wider and contested archive. Grotius and Vattel, Oppenheim and Lauterpacht, Lotus, the ICJ Statute, the UN Charter, UNCLOS, the BBNJ Agreement, human rights law, climate law, and responsibility remain part of the discipline’s world. But they do not exhaust it. Bedjaoui, Anand, Elias, Bandung, decolonisation, self-determination, resource sovereignty, common heritage, and later critical accounts such as Koskenniemi also belong to its inheritance. A post-Edenic international law cannot be a European canon with a later supplement. It must be a plural account of legal authority itself.

The task, then, is not to mourn the loss of an innocent international law. Nor is it to celebrate the fall as liberation. It is to think law after innocence. A post-Edenic international law would still need general norms, institutions, and forms of judgment. But it would speak more modestly about their foundations. It would understand universality as a practice to be earned, not a title inherited. It would recognise sovereignty as responsibility, not merely freedom. It would approach the common as a problem of participation and distribution, not merely administration. It would know that order is necessary, albeit that order always asks: whose order, made by whom, and at whose cost?

The world is all before international law. That is not a promise of redemption. It is a condition of responsibility. After Eden, the question is no longer whether international law can recover paradise. The question is whether it can walk, slowly and without metaphysical guarantees, toward a legal order capable of speaking more truthfully, more critically, and more justly from within the fallen world it helped to make.