Is International Law International?
- Kevin Crow
- 2018/09/21
- 已被閱讀 233次
- Journal of International Economic Law, Volume 21, Issue 3, Sep. 2018, pp. 739
Many of the world’s legal traditions root justifications for the ‘good’ or the ‘right’ in some kind of universalist assumption, appealing to ‘self-evident’ truths ascribed varyingly to ‘human nature’ or ‘the state of nature’ or in some way deducible to ‘given’ metaphysical rules by which humanity is bound.1 For example, in the Western tradition, legal philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke have set up metaphysics of nature upon which to premise arguments for law’s rightful role in a given collective of human beings. Hobbes famously painted humanity’s natural state as a state of scarcity, a ‘war of all against all’ in which all things are justified for individual survival,2 whereas Locke by contrast painted nature as a state of God-given abundance, regulated by the ‘natural’ laws of spoilage to guard against greed, corrupted only by the invention of currency that creates the possibility of inequality.3 In these narratives, and many other justifications for ‘the rule of law’, claims to governmental authority over anyone depend upon the validity of universalist assumptions applicable to everyone. Moreover, those assumptions are at least normatively defensible in the epistemic communities that produce them.4 However, as Anthea Roberts demonstrates in her brilliant new work, Is International Law International?, such universalist pillars are shaky at best as foundations for understanding international law. In fact, Roberts’ work suggests that it might be more accurate to refer to ‘international laws’ rather than ‘international law’—that is, a collection of normative orders flowing from similar treaty texts but constructing and expressing understandings of those texts in different ways in different places.5 Roberts’ work spends very little time analyzing international legal texts themselves, but rather Roberts focuses on how the law is taught, used, and understood in different parts of the world as well as how these understandings play out amid patterns of difference, dominance, and disruption in a rapidly shifting competitive world order. In this way, Is International Law International? carries elements of the almost biographical approach made famous by Martti Koskenniemi in From Apology to Utopia and other works;6 that is, she approaches understanding what the law is by understanding the individuals who wield great influence in shaping how the law is understood.
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