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Appraising the Methods of International Law: A Prospectus for Readers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2017

Steven R. Ratner  and
Anne-Marie Slaughter
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Extract

In 1908 the second volume of the American Journal of International Law featured a piece by Lassa Oppenheim entitled The Science of International Law: Its Tasks and Method. Oppenheim began his article by noting, apparently with some approval, that the first volume of AJIL, stacked with articles only by Americans, had “shown to the world that America is able to foster the science of international law without being dependent upon the assistance of foreign contributors.” Concerned, however, that students were “at first frequently quite helpless for want of method [and] mostly plunge into their work without a proper knowledge of the task of our science, without knowing how to make use of the assertions of authorities, and without the proper views for the valuation and appreciation of the material at hand,” Oppenheim sought to bring “the task and the method of this our science into discussion in this Journal.” What followed was a comprehensive exposition of his views on the purposes of international law and the methods available to lawyers and scholars for approaching the problems they face.

Type
Symposium on Method in International Law
Information
American Journal of International Law , Volume 93 , Issue 2 , April 1999 , pp. 291 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 1999

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References

1 Lassa Oppenheim, The Science of International Law: Its Tasks and Method, 2 AJIL 313, 313 (1908).

2 Id. at 313, 314.

3 See Ronald St. J. Macdonald & Douglas M.Johnston, International Legal Theory: New Frontiers of the Discipline, in The Structure and Process of International Law 1, 3 (Ronald St. J. Macdonald & Douglas M.Johnston eds., 1983).

4 The AJIL is not the first periodical of its kind to embrace the need for such an understanding. Our friends at the European Journal of International Law stated at the time of its founding a decade ago that they would devote pages to the intellectual legacies of the great European scholars, and their collections of essays on Friedmann, Verdross, Lauterpacht and Kelsen have been exemplary in this regard.

5 9 Oxford English Dictionary 690 (2d ed. 1989).

6 According to Kelsen:

[U]ne analyse juridique rigoureuse est indispensable pour atteindre I’amélioration si désirable de la technique du droit international. C’est justement pour remplir cette tâche de la politique du droit qu’une théorie pure du droit est nécessaire, de même qu’il n’y a pas de médecine scientifique sans biologie, pas de technique sans physique.

Hans Kelsen, Théorie Générale du Droit International Public: Problèmes Choisis, 42 Recueil des Cours 117, 122 (1932 IV). See also Hans Kelsen, Law and Peace in International Relations 82–122 (1942). For a trenchant analysis, see David Kennedy, The International Style in Postwar Law and Policy, 1994 Utah L. Rev. 7, 38–40.

7 Hans J. Morgenthau, Positivism, Functionalism, and International Law, 34 AJIL 260, 261 (1940). See also Samuel J. Astorino, The Impact of Sociological Jurisprudence on International Law in the Inter-War Period: The American Experience, 34 Duq. L. Rev. 277 (1996).

8 Philip Allott, Language, Method and the Nature of International Law, 45 Brit. Y.B. Int’l L. 79 (1971).

9 For one theory that nonetheless disguises itself as a method, see Martin Bos, A Methodology of International Law (1984); and id. at 2 (“methodology … in fact is a phenomenology”).

10 See, e.g., Shabtai Rosenne, Practice and Methods of International Law (1984).

11 The distinction between a legal theory—the conceptual framework—and a legal method is not the same as the distinction between “theory” and “practice.” At least one of the methods presented in this symposium rejects such a distinction on the ground that “theory is practice” and vice versa. Its point is rather that a method entails the application of more abstract concepts to more concrete problems.

12 See W. E. Butler, Comparative Approaches to International Law, 190 Recueil des Cours 9 (1985 I).

13 See Douglas M.Johnston, Functionalism in the Theory of International Law, 26 Can. Y.B. Int’l L. 3 (1988).

14 Macdonald & Johnston, supra note 3, at 4.

15 See Deborah Z. Cass, Navigating the Newstream: Recent Critical Scholarship in International Law, 65 Nordic J. Int’l L. 341 & n.3 (1996) (components of mainstream scholarship are “realist (Schwarzenberger, Weil, Watson), classicist (Fitzmaurice), and liberal-humanitarian (Henkin, McDougall [sic], Falk)”); Martti Kosken-Niemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument 131–91 (1989) (four schools are the “rule-approach position” (Schwarzenberger as paradigm), the “policy-approach position” (McDougal), the “skeptical position” (Morgenthau), and the “idealistic position” (Alvarez)).

16 See Hilaire McCoubrey & Nigel D. White, Textbook on Jurisprudence 11 (2d ed. 1996).

17 See Hans Kelsen, Principles of International Law 438–39 (Robert W. Tucker ed., 2d. rev. ed. 1966).

18 See, e.g., Myres S. McDougal & W. Michael Reisman, The Prescribing Function in the World Constitutive Process: How International Law Is Made, in International Law Essays 355, 377 (Myres S. McDougal & W. Michael Reisman eds., 1981).

19 Abram Chayes, Thomas Ehrlich & Andreas F. Lowenfeld, International Legal Process at xi (1968).

20 See Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin & Shelley Wright, Feminist Approaches to International Law, 85 AJIL 613, 621 (1991).

21 See, e.g., Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Aug. 12, 1949, Art. 3, 6 UST 3516, 75 UNTS 287 [hereinafter Geneva Convention IV]; Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts, Dec. 12, 1977, 1125 UNTS 609 [hereinafter Protocol II]. For instance, common Article 3 includes the following provision:

[T]he following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons [persons taking no active part in the hostilities]:

(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) taking of hostages;

(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;

(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

22 See, e.g., the list in Geneva Convention IV, supra note 21, Art. 147:

wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.

23 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Dec. 16, 1966, 999 UNTS 171.

24 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Dec. 9, 1948, 78 UNTS 277; Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, Sept. 7, 1956, 18 UST 3201, 266 UNTS 3; International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, Nov. 30, 1973, 1015 UNTS 243; Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Dec. 10, 1984, 1465 UNTS 85.

25 Charter of the International Military Tribunal, in Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis, Aug. 8, 1945, 59 Stat. 1544, 82 UNTS 279.

26 Statute of the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991, Art. 3, UN Doc. S/25704, annex (1993), reprinted in 32 ILM 1192 (1993).

27 Prosecutor v. Tadic, Appeal on Jurisdiction, No. IT–94–1–AR72 (Oct. 2,1995) (majority opinion), reprinted in 35 ILM 32 (1996).

28 Statute of the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Genocide and Other Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of Rwanda, SC Res. 955, UN SCOR, 49th Sess., Res. & Dec, at 15, Art. 4, UN Doc. S/INF/50 (1994), reprinted in 33 ILM 1602 (1994). Equally important, though less relevant for the symposium, the Statute of the Rwanda Tribunal defines crimes against humanity without any reference to armed conflict (interstate or internal) at all, thus confirming the severance of the nexus first included in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

29 Draft Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind, Art. 20 (f), in Report of the International Law Commission on the work of its forty-eighth session, UN GAOR, 51st Sess., Supp. No. 10, at 14,111–12, UN Doc. A/51/10 (1996). The future of the code remains quite uncertain in light of the codification of its key crimes in the statute of the international criminal court.

30 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, July 17,1998, Art. 8(c), (e), UN Doc. A/CONF.183/9*, reprinted in 37 ILM 999 (1998).

31 The definitive compilation of state practice in this area is the three-volume Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes (Neil J. Kritz ed., 1995). For a superlative account of the Eastern European experience, see Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism (1995).

32 See, e.g., Comments on Argentina, Report of the Human Rights Committee, UN GAOR, 50th Sess., Supp. No. 40, at 31, 32, paras. 153,158, UN Doc. A/50/40 (1995); Velásquez-Rodríguez Case, Inter-Am. Ct. H.R. (ser. C) No. 4, para. 174 (July 29, 1988); Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO) v. President of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (4) SA 671 (CC).

33 Recent articles and books include Steven R. Ratner, New Democracies, Old Atrocities: An Inquiry in International Law, 87 Geo. L.J. 707 (1999);Juan E. Mendez, Accountability for Past Abuses, 19 Hum. Rts. Q. 255 (1997); Carlos Santiago Nino, Radical Evil on Trial (1996); Symposium, Accountability for International Crime and Serious Violations of Fundamental Human Rights, 59 Law & Contemp. Probs. 1 (1996); Impunity and Human Rights in International Law and Practice (Naomi Roht-Arriaza ed., 1995); Diane F. Orendicher, Settling Accounts: The Duty to Prosecute Human Rights Violations of a Prior Regime, 100 Yale L.J. 2537 (1991).

34 See, e.g., Andreas R. Ziegler, Case note, In re G., 92 AJIL 78 (1998) (Mil. Trib. Division 1, Switz., Apr. 18, 1997); Christoph J. M. Safferling, Case note, Public Prosecutor v. Djajić, 92 AJIL 528 (1998) (Sup. Ct. Bavaria May 23, 1997); Anthony De Palma, Canadians Surprised by Proposal to Extradite Pol Pot, N.Y. Times, June 24, 1997, at A10.

35 Kennedy, supra note 6, at 39.

36 Oppenheim, supra note 1, at 333 (“the method to be applied by the science of international law can be no other than the positive method”).

37 For a classic explanation of legal reasoning in the domestic context, see Edward H. Levi, An Introduction to Legal Reasoning (1949).

38 See, e.g., North Sea Continental Shelf Cases (FRG/Den.; FRG/Neth.), 1969 ICJ Rep. 3, 51–52 (Feb. 20).

39 Cf. Koskenniemi, supra note 15, at 189–90 (stating that four modernist approaches are both mutually exclusive and incapable of offering a rational choice among them).

40 See, e.g., Thomas M. Franck, The Power of Legitimacy Among Nations (1990); Fernando R. Tesón, The Kantian Theory of International Law, 92 Colum. L. Rev. 53 (1992).