The Justiciability of International Disputes

1916 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79
Author(s):  
Jesse S. Reeves
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Society ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Ideal

The appalling record of the past year and a half ought to make us, interested in international law, extremely modest. Professing that we expound international law as it is, we have been deluding ourselves and really setting forth international law as we believed that it ought to be. The universal bankruptcy of normal international relationships has shown to us how great a gap there is between that which we had conceived to be and that which really exists. Many of the foundations of international law we now see to have rested upon a conception of international society which did not really obtain. Perhaps, too, although professing contact with the actual, we have been living in an unreal world, a world wherein the ideal was given a much wider range and play than we were justified in believing. Any attempt to reconstruct the formal bases of international law—and such reconstruction must be made—must take account not only of the experiences of the present war, but of the long series of half-submerged elements which led to the present disaster almost with the inexorability of the forces of natural law. Shocked and benumbed as we are by the constant revelations of horror in these past months, there is also the awful realization that, after all, what has taken place has been largely the result of factors seemingly without immediate human direction.

Ciceronian international society

2019 ◽  
pp. 175508821989578
Author(s):  
Stephen Patrick Sims
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
International Society ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Valuable Resource ◽  
Future Thinking ◽  
International Theory ◽  
Political Thinker

This article explores what Cicero as a political thinker can offer to the study of international relations. Although previous readings of Cicero have emphasized his Stoic influences and his natural law teaching as the basis of a cosmopolitan world society, I emphasize the way in which Cicero can deepen the concept of international society. International society relies on certain norms and institutions to function properly, such as international law, sovereignty, and the use of war to restrain violence and redress injustice. We find all these concepts articulated clearly in Cicero’s moral and political thought. Cicero also shows the limits of these institutions and norms, explaining why none of them is absolute. Finally, Cicero adds to our theorizing about international society by drawing attention to the role of honor, ruling, and inequality in international society. As such, classical political thought, and Cicero’s in particular, provide a valuable resource for future thinking about international theory.

scholarly journals What is Positivism Today?

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 114 ◽  
pp. 87-91
Author(s):  
Mónica García-Salmones Rovira
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Society ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
International Community ◽  
Global Society ◽  
Real Power ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
Cultural Terms ◽  
The World ◽  
The Ideal

This essay focuses on the understanding of positivism in Prosper Weil's time, its trajectory since, and how that trajectory reflects changes that have occurred in global society in the intervening years. The world to which Weil spoke is neither in scientific nor in political and cultural terms the same as ours. Key positivist notions, such as neutrality or Weil's critique of the ideal of the unity of the international community and of the invocation of higher moral values, appear to chain sound normative principles while letting loose real power. At any rate, Weil's ideas have not survived globalization or the critical and historical turn taken in the discipline of international law. And yet “Towards Relative Normativity?” arguably owes its lasting significance to its grasp of the weight of the authority of law in international society.

Utopian Relations: A Literary Perspective on International Law and Justice

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 521-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly De Luca
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Correct Operation ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Law And Justice ◽  
Unitary Concept ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Ideal

This article posits an interpretation of Thomas More’sUtopiathat focuses on the ways in which the nature of justice within a putatively ideal state is illuminated by references to international relations and the law of nations. Like Plato’sRepublic,Utopiauses differences of scale to provide a lens through which to examine the operation in one context of a unitary concept that is more visible elsewhere. Justice is constructed as a single concept; thus, in the same way that Plato uses the justice of thekallipolisto provide insight into the justice of an individual, More uses the justice of the international community to provide a macroscopic perspective on justice as it exists within a sovereign state. Through discussions of trade, diplomacy, war and empire, Utopian understandings of international law and justice are revealed. The ideal organisation of the state is then characterised as one in which the resulting notions of justice, defined as the correct operation of laws that accord with natural law, are institutionalised.

scholarly journals Uniformity or Unilateralism in the Law of Carriage of Goods by Sea?

2000 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 355
Author(s):  
Paul Myburgh
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Conflict Of Laws ◽  
Maritime Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
Multimodal Transport ◽  
International Transport ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Ideal

The ideal of international uniformity has always been regarded as particularly important to maritime law. However, over the past decade or so, the uniformity of the law of international carriage of goods by sea has increasingly been undermined by the unilateral adoption by maritime jurisdictions of "hybrid carriage regimes" which depart from the established international uniform rules.In this article Paul Myburgh argues that this trend towards adoption of divergent carriage regimes is highly problematic, not merely because of their detrimental effects on international uniformity and the coherence of maritime law and international transport law in general, but also because of more fundamental concerns about the validity of these regimes at international law, the practical conflict of laws problems that that they will generate, and their distorting effects on multimodal transport. The article concludes with some suggestions for future reform in this area.

The Tyranny of the Ideal

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Gaus
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Moral Inquiry ◽  
Open Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theories Of Justice ◽  
The World ◽  
Diverse Society ◽  
Just Society ◽  
The Ideal

This book lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. It shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. The book argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice—essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years—needs to change. Drawing on recent work in social science and philosophy, the book points to an important paradox: only those in a heterogeneous society—with its various religious, moral, and political perspectives—have a reasonable hope of understanding what an ideally just society would be like. However, due to its very nature, this world could never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. The book defends the moral constitution of this pluralistic, open society, where the very clash and disagreement of ideals spurs all to better understand what their personal ideals of justice happen to be. Presenting an original framework for how we should think about morality, this book rigorously analyzes a theory of ideal justice more suitable for contemporary times.

Statehood and the State-Like in International Law

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowan Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
International Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Important Conclusion ◽  
Territorial Integrity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Peremptory Norms ◽  
Legal Sense

If the term were given its literal meaning, international law would be law between ‘nations’. It is often described instead as being primarily between states. But this conceals the diversity of the nations or state-like entities that have personality in international law or that have had it historically. This book reconceptualizes statehood by positioning it within that wider family of state-like entities. An important conclusion of the book is that states themselves have diverse legal underpinnings. Practice in cases such as Somalia and broader principles indicate that international law provides not one but two alternative methods of qualifying as a state: subject to exceptions connected with territorial integrity and peremptory norms, an entity can be a state either on the ground that it meets criteria of effectiveness or on the ground that it is recognized by all other states. Another conclusion is that states, in the strict legal sense in which the word is used today, have never been the only state-like entities with personality in international law. Others from the past and present include imperial China in the period when it was unreceptive to Western norms; pre-colonial African chiefdoms; ‘states-in-context’, an example of which may be Palestine, which have the attributes of statehood relative to states that recognize them; and entities such as Hong Kong.

Cardinal Richelieu between Vattel and Machiavelli

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Carty
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Rule Of Reason

The view that no form of international law existed in seventeenth-century France, and that this time was a part of ‘prehistory’, and thus irrelevant for international legal thought today is challenged. In addition, the traditional claim of Richelieu to be an admirer of Machiavelli and his Ragion di Stato doctrine to the detriment of the aim of concluding treaties and keeping them (as sacred), is refuted by careful historical research. In Richelieu’s thinking, there is a role for law to play but it is law as justice, law in the classical natural law tradition. Those who rule are subject to the rule of law as justice, the rule of God, or the rule of reason. In Richelieu’s world, kings and ministers are rational instruments of the practical implementation of God’s will on earth.

Looking Backward 2000-1887

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Ideal Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Utopian Fiction ◽  
Socialist Utopia ◽  
Year 2000 ◽  
The Ideal

‘No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.’ Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people’s everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont’s lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.

“Ambiguist” Statesmanship

Worldview ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 7-8
Author(s):  
Will Herberg
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Fixed Points ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Actual Situation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Rational Mind ◽  
The One

John Courtney Murray's writing cannot fail to be profound and instructive, and I have profited greatly from it in the course of the past decade. But I must confess that his article, "Morality and Foreign Policy" (Worldview, May), leaves me in a strange confusion of mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can sympathize with what I might call the historical intention of the natural law philosophy he espouses, which I take to be the effort to establish enduring structures of meaning and value to serve as fixed points of moral decision in the complexities of the actual situation. On the other hand, I am rather put off by the calm assurance he exhibits when he deals with these matters, as though everything were at bottom unequivocally rational and unequivocally accessible to the rational mind. And I am really distressed at what seems to 3ie to be his woefully inadequate appreciation of the position of the "ambiguists," among whom I cannot deny I count myself.

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