The Nature of International Law

Abstract

ONE of the most frequent assertions made among lawyers who are not specialists in the field is that there is no such thing as international law. Then, remembering their background as civil lawyers, they fall back on the rolled-up plea and assert that even if there is such a thing, it is not law and is wrongly described as such. It is not only the lawyers, however, who regard international law as something of a pretence. The man on the Clapham omnibus, too, in so far as he thinks about the subject at all, tends to regard international law as something that statesmen talk about, but which none of them has any intention of regarding. The blame for the development of such attitudes may, largely, be placed at the door of international lawyers themselves. Too many of them, accepting the academic nature of their subject, have adopted for themselves an egocentric ipse-dixitism that may have served their own ideas of self-aggrandizement, but that has done nothing but harm to the subject they profess to serve. There is a tendency for such authorities to postulate a principle as law, and to maintain it is such regardless of evidence that states in their practice have consistently behaved in a contrary fashion, without any allegations being made that such conduct constitutes a breach of the law.