Locating the informed publics

Abstract

Daniel Joyce’s book is more than a publication. It is a testimony to courage. When he started this book project, I had a few brief chats with the author. He harboured doubts, as some experienced scholars in the field had given him free advice: do not take up such a vague and undefined topic. International law is about sources and rules and their application; not about media and public communication. The author wisely decided to ignore this free advice, to follow his own intuition and curiosity instead. The result is the topic of this symposium: Informed Publics, Media and International Law, a remarkable and important book. The book also shows that Joyce’s premature critics suffer from lack of knowledge of the history of the discipline. What may sound like a hip, twenty-first century topic, was actually already discussed extensively in 1907, with the launch of the very first issue of the American Journal of International Law. Joyce’s book discusses how Elihu Root opened that issue with an editorial discussing the need for an enlightened public, one that is morally and legally educated about its rights and entitlements.1 The book traces the attention to the notion of public opinion in the discipline since then, pointing, for example, to Hersch Lauterpacht’s belief in a well-informed public opinion as a source of legitimacy and effectiveness in international law.2 The book could even have gone back much further in history, pointing at the ‘right to communicate’ which underpinned Francesco de Vitoria’s natural law foundations of international law. The rise of international law is, after all, closely tied to colonial expansion and the corresponding imperatives to travel, trade and communicate.3 In any case, the book makes a clear point: publics, communication and media have always been a central topic for international lawyers (and for good reason). What has changed of course are the particular forms through which information and communication are mediated. Since ‘the media is the message’, it is essential to keep updating how international law is mediated and how international law defines and seeks to regulate the media. Because of this, Joyce’s book is a welcome and original contribution to the field. It is also a book that fits within a longer tradition in international law. This is not only true for the very topic (media and international law), but also for the main concern expressed in the book: how to facilitate informed, enlightened publics?