It’s all about relationships! The psychology of human rights.

Abstract

H aving spent more than a few hours in law school faculty lounges over the years, I suspect that there are few settings (Irish pubs reputedly among them) in which good-natured banter is more frequent or apparently mundane discourse is more atmospheric. Probably by both personal inclination and professional socialization, lawyers like to argue, and law professors are especially adept in such verbal jousting. Moreover, their already formidable forensic skills are honed by daily repartee with students less experienced in the art. It is unsurprising to observers of university culture to hear that such verbal contests often escalate during the season of recruitment of fledgling faculty. In such a context, I once heard an especially erudite colleague proclaim only half jokingly that any law professor, no matter how (un)skilled, could fully prepare a course on international law in just a few hours. (The half-serious implication was that the law school undoubtedly had a better place to invest money than in the recruitment of an assistant professor to teach international law.) My colleague’s flippant remark apparently rested on two related observations that together account for the relatively low status of international lawyers (or worse, novice lawyers teaching international law) in law schools. First, in a technical sense, there is not much law in international law. Although international tribunals create a body of decisions, they do not have the rich heritage of precedents found, for example, in U.S. constitutional law or Anglo-American common law. the community