International Legal Structures

Zusammenfassung

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.

Schlagworte

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Bibliographische Angaben

Copyrightjahr

1987

ISBN-Print

978-3-7890-1367-6

ISBN-Online

978-3-7489-6892-4

Verlag

Nomos, Baden-Baden

Sprache

Deutsch

Seiten

294

Produkttyp

Monographie