Letter to the Editors of the Symposium

As I started to think about how to respond to your kind invitation to participate in the symposium on method in international law, and what to write to the readers of the Journal, I soon noticed that it was impossible for me to think about my—or indeed anybody’s—“method” in the way suggested by the symposium format. This was only in part because I felt that your (and sometimes others’) classification of my work as representative of something called “critical legal studies” failed to make sense of large chunks of it whose labeling as “CLS” might seem an insult to those in the American legal academy who had organized themselves in the 1970s and early 1980s under that banner. You may, of course, have asked me to write about “CLS” in international law irrespectively of whether I was a true representative of its method (whatever that method might be). Perhaps I was only asked to explain how people generally identified as “critics” went about writing as they did. But I felt wholly unqualified to undertake such a task. Dozens of academic studies had been published on the structure, history and ideology of critical legal studies in the United States and elsewhere. Although that material is interesting, and often of high academic quality, little of it describes the work of people in our field sometimes associated with critical legal studies—but more commonly classed under the label of “new approaches to international law.“1 In fact, new writing in the field was so heterogeneous, self-reflective and sometimes outright ironic that the conventions of academic analysis about “method” would inevitably fail to articulate its reality.