International Law at the Vanishing Point

2006 ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Richard Falk ◽  
Asli Ü. Bâli
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Vanishing Point

International Legal Order as an Idea

1979 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Greenwood Onuf
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
International Politics ◽  
International Order ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Vanishing Point ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
International Legal Order

International law, its masters tell us, is “the vanishing point of jurisprudence.” So must be international politics, and all of international relations, for political theory. The recurrent and directing theme in political theory is the problem of order—how it is provided, maintained, altered, and so on. Order resides in orderly relations, that is, patterned and predictable relations, among people, but is abstracted from those relations as any arrangement of norms and institutions that distributes values among people. Among peoples, political theorists favor the alternative premise that anarchy, not order, reigns. By not existing, international order needs no explaining. Evidence to the contrary can be explained away as anomalous or ephemeral, and therefore not of theoretical interest. From this follows the dominance of concern for conflict and disorder and the paucity of theory in the study of international politics.

The laws of war and moral judgment

1977 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-136
Author(s):  
Terry Nardin
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
International Law ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Vanishing Point ◽  
Laws Of War ◽  
Legal Validity ◽  
The One

Reflection on the laws of war seldom fails to produce misgivings. On the one hand, it seems clear that practices as ugly as those of warfare must be regulated, if only to secure society against the emergence of unchecked brutality. Yet when the rules that have been devised toward this end are examined, doubt is cast upon even this cheerless justification by the extent of the violence and destruction with which they are compatible. The laws of war seem to condone the use of force in pursuit of indefensible policies, as well as to allow a degree of suffering by those affected by war that is often disproportionate to the apparent advantages to be had from fighting. Even the few restraints the laws do require are frequently ignored. The result is scepticism concerning every aspect of the laws of war: their effectiveness, their legal validity (and thus their very existence as rules of law) and their defensibility in terms of the requirements of morality from which they appear so often to deviate. Such scepticism is only strengthened by reflection on the vagaries of criminal enforcement and punishment, which at times are not only ineffective, but also introduce their own special injustices. It is a scepticism well expressed in the observation that if international law is at the vanishing point of law, then the laws of war are at the vanishing point of international law. The excesses of present-day warfare have given particular impetus to one aspect of this attitude toward the laws of war, that based upon doubts concerning their moral adequacy.

The Implementation of the Modern Law of Armed Conflicts

1973 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
G. I. A. D. Draper
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Vanishing Point ◽  
Law Of War ◽  
International Lawyer ◽  
Geneva Conventions ◽  
The Law

The late Sir Hersch Lauterpacht once expressed the view that “if international law is, in some ways, at the vanishing point of law, the law of war is, perhaps, even more conspicuously, at the vanishing point of international law”. This led him to the conclusion that the international lawyer must therefore do his duty, in the three particular areas to which he was then drawing the attention of his readers, “with determination though without complacency, and perhaps not always very hopefully”. The three spheres which Lauterpacht considered as meriting the attention of international lawyers at the time at which he wrote, 1953, were “further legal regulation of the humanitarian fringe of the problems involved in the use of new weapons of war, sustained exposition and clarification of the far-reaching provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the further clarification of matters not covered by the Geneva Conventions, including the implication of the principle that the law of war is binding not only upon States but also upon individuals”. This great jurist did not live to see the current endeavours that are being made to carry out a revision of the international law of war and the increasing attention that is being paid to the humanitarian content of that law, and even more specifically, to the quest for better and more effective means of implementation of that law.

The Conventional Weapons Convention: A modest but useful treaty

1990 ◽  
Vol 30 (279) ◽  
pp. 498-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. J. Fenrick
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The Body ◽  
Vanishing Point ◽  
Law Of War ◽  
One Stage ◽  
Conventional Weapons ◽  
United Nations Convention ◽  
The Law

The author commenced an earlier study of the 1980 United Nations Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons (Conventional Weapons Convention) by quoting the late Sir Hersch Lauterpacht's remark: “If international law is, in some ways, the vanishing point of law, the law of war is, perhaps even more conspicuously, at the vanishing point of international law”. He then carried Lauterpacht's statement one stage further to suggest that the vanishing point of the law of war was most likely to be found in the body of law restricting the use of weapons. Shortly after writing these words, the author discovered that a colleague had also used the remarks of Sir Hersch and asserted that the vanishing point of the law of war was the law of air warfare. More recently, the author read a paper by a younger colleague in which Sir Hersch was quoted once again, but this time it was asserted that the vanishing point of the law of war was to be found in the body of law regulating nuclear weapons. The two lessons one might derive from this brief tale are that serious students of the law of war rarely have grandiose expectations for their discipline and that a good quotation is always reusable.

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