Hard and Soft International Law and Their Contribution to Social Change: the Lessons Learned

Abstract

This chapter is the concluding chapter of a book that explores how lawyers and their state and non-state clients use international law to promote social change, with a particular focus on the choice between hard and soft international law approaches. The book contains a series of case studies examine this choice between hard and soft international law in a variety of contexts, allowing an assessment of the factors that influence that choice, including the strengths and weaknesses of available legal instruments and the implications of the choice for meeting the underlying social change objectives. In the first chapter of the book we posed seven questions about the relationship between hard and soft international law. The case studies that followed this first chapter provide the material for answering these questions. The purpose of this last chapter is to answer the questions and to address some of the additional issues that arise therefrom. The chapter consists of three parts. The first part is to answer the questions and provide a review of the lessons learned from the case studies about the seven questions. The second part is a discussion of some issues that arise from this review. The third part is a conclusion.