@book{1987:kennedy:internatio,
title = {International Legal Structures},
year = {1987},
note = {International Legal Structures develops an internal analysis of
international legal doctrine and argument. A now classic early study
of the “semiotics” of legal argument, the book analyzes instances
of legal argument to identify the underlying patterns of association,
repetition and reference which animate the ways that specific
arguments are experienced. The book breaks from the tradition of
situating international law in relationship to political forces to
examine the rhetorical patterns within the field, including the way in
which the discipline rhetorically manages its relationship to what it
sees as a political context. The objective is to develop a kind of
“grammar” of international legal argument. The study focuses on
the relationships among three broad doctrinal categories and
disciplinary preoccupations: “sources of law” and the problem of
law’s validity or persuasiveness, “process” and the problem of
establishing powers and structuring interactions among actors, and
“substance” purporting the regulate one or another real world
problem, from peaceful cooperation on the high seas to force. Within
each field, it identifies a series of tensions which are repeated in
specific doctrinal debates. The study concludes that international law
functions by managing the relationship among this series of
irresolvable tensions. The rhetorical maneuvers which characterize
routine international legal argument are neither so varied that one
cannot identify them in one after another doctrinal area, nor so
uniform that they can be experienced as simple repetition. The study
concludes by suggesting that the field’s success depends not on its
ability to resolve or settle issues through legal analysis, but upon
its ability to sustain a fluid complexity in their discussion,
shifting focus from one doctrinal area to another, from one rule to
another, from one interpretation to another, until the experience of a
satisfying conclusion is reached. This practice in turn sustains the
discipline’s own status and vitality. Indeed, the patterns of
repetition and reference which characterize public international legal
argument seem suited to an interminable discourse. Social difficulties
are transformed into rhetorical alternatives which are both able to
invoke social choices as hyperbolically stark alternatives and to
reframe them in ever smaller increments of doctrinal difference. As a
result, doctrinal alternatives can be experienced both as posing
dramatic questions of the greatest philosophical and political
gravity, and as capable of resolution through subtle shifts among a
series related doctrinal presentations. The numerous ways in which a
set of accommodative balances, tempering one rhetoric by another,
produce a feeling of closure and determinacy – until they are
re-opened by contestation. In this, the interminability of
international law discourse seems the subtle secret of its success.
David Kennedy is Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for
Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, where he has taught since
1981.},
edition = {1},
publisher = {Nomos},
address = {Baden-Baden},
series = {},
volume = {},
author = {Kennedy, David}
}