International Legal Profession Research Articles

The social field of international adjudication: Structures and practices of a conflictive professional universe

AbstractThe modern professional world of international adjudication bears little trace of the ‘invisible college’ theorized by Oscar Schachter 50 years go. Instead, it has become a social field marked by a fierce competition among actors possessing unequal skills and influence. Moving from these premises, this article unravels the socio-professional dynamics of the community of legal experts – judges, arbitrators, government agents, private counsel, court bureaucrats, specialized academics, etc. – dealing with the judicial settlement of international disputes on a daily basis. On the one hand, the community has developed a specific set of social structures, practices, and dispositions that distinguish it from the rest of the international legal profession and insulate its activities from outside interference. On the other, it is the site of an endless struggle among its participants, who deploy various forms of capital to consolidate their positions relative to one another. Having outlined the twofold structure of the community – externally autonomous and internally conflictive – the article reflects on how co-operation and competition affect the everyday unfolding of international judicial proceedings and the production of legal outcomes at the international level.

Ableism in the college of international lawyers: On disabling differences in the professional field

AbstractIn the wake of the #metoo and #blacklivesmatter movements, the masculine and ‘methodologically white’ nature of the core of the international legal profession has received renewed attention, and attempts to diversify it are well underway. Absent from the conversations that accompany such diversification efforts are reflections on the pervasiveness of ableism in the profession. Ableism describes implicit assumptions about the species-typical condition of the human body and the ways in which it interacts with the material and social world. The importance of ableism in excluding and marginalizing persons with disabling differences in international legal academia has widely been overlooked. This neglect simultaneously contributes to ableist re-productions of the profession and affects how international law understands and governs disability.

The Road Ahead and Beyond: Future Challenges and Opportunities in the Legal Profession

This panel touched upon the challenges that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic brought to the international legal profession and explored opportunities for new professionals. The focus lay on practical suggestions for topics to look out for in the near future.

Inculcating International Law: the Textbook as Gateway

International students struggle with the lack of hierarchy and enforcement, and the apparent differences between international law and the domestic legal system to which they have been exposed. Sometimes, by drawing analogies with these domestic systems, they impose a legal form that is incommensurable with the reality of international legal structures. Newcomers to international law are altogether perplexed by the very concepts of international legal normativity and how they can be reconciled with insights from other disciplines. In short, textbooks are the vehicle through which the next generation will be initiated into the international legal profession. This paper shares some insights on the writing of an international law textbook that emerged during the writing process. In particular, it focusses on the challenge on how to reconcile the essentially Western, imperial, and colonial heritage of modern international law with a genuine desire to avoid simply reproducing that process of Westernisation. The Eurocentric narrative of international law as a universal legal order is part of its founding myth, and has been integral to the reception and acceptance of international law outside the West. Excavating that myth is a valuable part of international law teaching and scholarship, and not one that can be simply ignored.

E Pluribus Unum? A Divisible College?: Reflections on the International Legal Profession

Anthea Roberts’ ambitious monograph, Is International Law International?, calls on international lawyers to suspend our universalist pretensions and reflect from the perspective of different communities of international lawyers, conceived instead as a ‘divisible college’. Her innovative and contemporary empirical work – on the educational and discursive practices across the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – represents nothing less than a first stab at a sociology of the international legal profession. In doing so, Roberts has adopted a consciously descriptive approach, with all of the consequences entailed thereby. Moreover, her privileging of certain methods and the focus on the five veto-wielding powers has the potential to reproduce the very power imbalances that she seeks to illuminate and possibly to challenge. Finally, an important counterpoint to the divisibility of the international legal profession is that, however diverse we may be, we nevertheless remain united by certain other tenets – in particular, our shared understanding of what concepts and ideas find purchase on the international plane and our engagement with, commitment to, or resistance to these concepts and ideas. The ties that bind our epistemic community might be obscured by undue emphasis on our profession as a divisible college.

QUARTER OF A CENTURY ON FROM THE SOVIET ERA: REFLECTIONS ON RUSSIAN DOCTRINAL RESPONSES TO THE ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA

The article is intended to give a reader a broader view of the post-Crimean academic discussion within Russia. The justifications offered by Russia for its actions in Crimea in 2014 were met with scepticism by the international community and international lawyers across various jurisdictions. Among Russian international legal scholars there were almost no critical voices willing to assess Crimea’s annexation as at least questionable under international law. Rather, these scholars, in their overwhelming majority, spoke or wrote on the matter in feverish defence of Russia’s actions. Some international scholars who study “Russian” approaches to international law or come across them aspart of their research seem prepared to justify the striking unity of perspective among Russian academic international lawyers by reference to the historically authoritarian nature of the Russian state. This article counters arguments of such would-be deference, suggesting that Russian academia be looked at by reference to the emerging standard of international legal profession.

Is International Relations Corrosive of International Law? A Reply to Martti Koskenniemi

Over the past two decades, cooperation between international law (IL) and international relations (IR) scholars has produced a vibrant, interdisciplinary IL/IR scholarship. Yet such interdisciplinarity has also produced a backlash from some legal scholars. Martti Koskenniemi, in particular, has for decades warned legal scholars about the potentially damaging effects of exposure to international relations. In his writings, Koskenniemi paints a picture of an IR field dominated by realism, in thrall to American policy-makers, and firmly committed to an antiformalism that is corrosive of international law and of the international legal profession, whose American practitioners have become so corrupted as to be unable to distinguish the law from the interests of American imperial power. Koskenniemi’s concerns, I argue, are not without foundation, yet his critique of IR represents at best an anachronism, and at worst a distortion of IR scholars’ attitudes, aims, and influence on the legal profession. IR scholarship is guilty of multiple sins, which can and should be corrected in dialogue with international legal scholars, but these sins are quite different from those imagined by Koskenniemi. The paper is organized in three parts. In the first, I briefly summarize Koskenniemi’s indictment of IR, including his provocative claim that IR has corrupted the American international law community. This argument, I argue, is flawed by a series of distortions of the views of IR and legal scholars alike, and does not survive careful scrutiny. In the second part of the paper, I take issue with Koskenniemi’s characterization of the IR field as a realist policy science, drawing on recent data to depict a field that is far more theoretically diverse and less in thrall to American policy-makers than Koskenniemi suggests. This is not to say, however, that IR scholarship is without fault as an approach to the study of international law. In the third and final section, therefore, I consider the real problems with IR scholarship in relation to international law. By contrast with Koskenniemi, who sees IR’s relentless antiformalism and commitment to interdisciplinarity as the field’s original sins, I argue that contemporary IR is characterized by precisely the opposite problems, namely a naive and unwitting formalism in its treatment of law, and a disciplinary insularity that has prevented IR scholars from learning some basic lessons that are familiar to international legal scholars. These weaknesses of IR scholarship are real, but they are remediable through more, not less, interdisciplinary collaboration.

An Epilogue on an Epilogue

As the last straw, a question: where does it (From Apology to Utopia) lead us to, what are we to make of and with it (international law)? The author himself hints at an answer in the very last sentence of the Epilogue, which marks the difference between the original and this new edition of From Apology to Utopia (FATU), by pointing to his second Hauptwerk, the seminal Gentle Civilizer of Nations and the story about international lawyers it tells. Indeed, the last paragraph of FATU thereby becomes a sort of epi-epilogue, an interpretive afterthought on Gentle Civilizer, written after the original FATU, within the afterthought of FATU's new edition, written after Gentle Civilizer. The latter is taken to illustrate the consequences of FATU for both individual practitioner and academic lawyers, notably the continuous double bind between law and politics inherent in the structure of international law. That double bind demands, according to Koskenniemi, at once coolness and passion, that is, as he concludes, “a full mastery of the grammar and a sensitivity to the uses to which it is put.” This, of course, alludes once again to the twofold intent that inspires FATU: to disinter with archeological precision the grammatical structure of international law and to thereby enable its critique, or, as the author puts it in the Epilogue, to join a descriptive with a normative project. The double-edged argument that has resulted from this combination has uniquely captured the letter and spirit of international legal practice and has mesmerized the international legal profession ever since it first appeared in 1989. Together with Gentle Civilizer, it has justly made its author into one of the iconic figures of international legal theory of the intellectual fin-de-siècle of the outgoing twentieth and the incoming twenty-first century. Yet, for all the echoes FATU has been occasioning in virtually all corners of the legal theoretical spectrum, the consequences that flow from it for legal theory and practice have remained somewhat under-explored.

The International Legal Profession: A Need for More Governance?

The International Legal Profession: A Need for More Governance?

The Case for International Law Schools and an International Legal Profession

IN most parts of the world, we have come to regard law as definitionally linked either with territory (divided by the boundaries of nation States) or with nationality (based on citizenship or residence). Historically, these notions have not always been prevalent; quite the contrary. Yet they are cornerstones in the very structure of modern societies. Government, the exclusive jurisdiction of courts and enforcement mechanisms are at once the cause of these conceptions and their tangible outward manifestation. Public international law alone, which lacks such means of power, has succeeded in remaining a universal legal system; at least that is true of some pure elements of it. It is banal to observe that the peoples and countries of the world are economically interdependent. But recent history has taught us, and the news media remind us daily, that we now depend on each other to such a degree that significant disruptions in the flows of money, transport, commodities, manufactured products and technology will endanger our survival and create upheavals even in the most stable societies. Confronted by these new and important dimensions of matters which are the stock-in-trade of the international lawyer, it is only natural for him to pose certain fundamental questions: Do the basic concepts of laws confined to territory or nationality (the latter illustrated prominently by the application of long-arm statutes) and exclusive national jurisdictions in fact apply ? Are the international financial and commercial transactions, all of which also necessarily are international legal transactions, properly designed to overcome the obvious impediments of multiple, rival legal systems ? Are the changes which have occurred in real life such that a reform of the law, and a re-orientation of our legal precepts, are called for ? It is with considerable trepidation that I have formulated in such sweeping terms the broad issues, some aspects of which I intend to discuss here. I am deeply conscious of addressing a uniquely qualified and distinguished readership whose members design and document many of these international legal transactions and resolve a number of