Cleaved International Law: Exploring the Dynamic Relationship between International Climate Change Law and International Health Law

Abstract

The field of international law often is taught and thought of as a group of disconnected substantive subfields, each with its own epistemic community. These specialized subfields range from international human rights law to the law of the sea, from international trade law to collective security law. Examples where subfields conflict with each other and separate examples where subfields complement each other have led two camps of commentators over the past decade to comprehensively define international law’s nature as either united or fragmented in a binary fashion. Even the United Nations’ International Law Commission established a study group to explore this topic, which concluded in 2006 after over four years of study that international law is fragmented due, in part, to the collision of various branches of international law.