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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Work Of International Law, Monica Hakimi
The Work Of International Law, Monica Hakimi
Articles
This Article crystallizes and then critiques a prominent view about the role of international law in the global order. The view - what I call the "cooperation thesis" - is that international law serves to help global actors cooperate, specifically by: (1) curbing their disputes, and (2) promoting their shared goals. The cooperation thesis often appears as a positive account of international law; it purports to explain or describe what international law does. But it also has normative force; international law is widely depicted as dysfunctional when it does not satisfy the thesis. In particular, heated or intractable conflict is …
From Enlightened Positivism To Cosmopolitan Justice: Obstacles And Opportunities, Steven Ratner
From Enlightened Positivism To Cosmopolitan Justice: Obstacles And Opportunities, Steven Ratner
Book Chapters
This paper explores the possibilities for linkages between various forms of positivism accepted by many international lawyers and various forms of cosmopolitanism advocated by scholars of global justice. Building on Bruno Simma's conception of "enlightened positivism," it identifies areas in which cosmopolitan trends have already seeped into the fabric of international law and the key gaps between positivist and cosmopolitan visions of international law and the international community. Emphasizing the contributions that philosophical inquiry can add to international legal scholarship, and vice-versa, it concludes with some thoughts on further integration of cosmopolitan thinking into positivist methodologies.
Pragmatism Regained, Christopher Kutz
Pragmatism Regained, Christopher Kutz
Michigan Law Review
Jules Coleman's The Practice of Principle serves as a focal point for current, newly intensified debates in legal theory, and provides some of the deepest, most sustained reflections on methodology that legal theory has seen. Coleman is one of the leading legal philosophers in the Anglo-American world, and his writings on tort theory, contract theory, the normative foundations of law and economics, social choice theory, and analytical jurisprudence have been the point of departure for much of the most interesting activity in the field for the last three decades. Indeed, the origin of this book lies in Oxford University's invitation …
Game Theory And Customary International Law: A Response To Professors Goldsmith And Posner, Mark A. Chinen
Game Theory And Customary International Law: A Response To Professors Goldsmith And Posner, Mark A. Chinen
Michigan Journal of International Law
In a pair of recent articles, Professors Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner have used game theoretic principles to challenge the positivist account of customary international law. Their writings join other early attempts to apply game theory to the international law sources. The author has two purposes in this Article. The first is to evaluate game theory's potential for yielding greater insight into customary international law and international law more generally. The second is to respond to the conclusions about customary international law drawn by Professors Goldsmith and Posner.
Further Thoughts On Customary International Law, Jack L. Goldsmith, Eric A. Posner
Further Thoughts On Customary International Law, Jack L. Goldsmith, Eric A. Posner
Michigan Journal of International Law
In two earlier articles, the tools of game theory were used to sketch a positive theoretical account of customary international law ("CIL"). This theory rejected as question-begging the usual explanations of CIL based on legality, morality, opinio juris, and related concepts. It was argued instead that CIL emerges from nations' pursuit of self-interested policies on the international stage. This approach helps explain many overlooked features of CIL, including how CIL originates and changes, why the content of CIL tracks the interest of powerful nations, and why nations change their views of CIL when their interests change. Finally, the practices …
The Gift Of Language, Joseph Vining
The Gift Of Language, Joseph Vining
Articles
Style and substance cross-are genetically related as we now might want to say. Each draws on and is implied by the other. One point at which they cross is our sense of the nature of human language, what language is and can be, what it is not and can never be. The language of law is part of human language. Law is a distinctive form of thought, but it lives in human language. "Rule" might be thought synonymous with "law," but for all its talk of rules, the practice of law does not begin with a descriptive statement, or a …
Misunderstanding Positivism, Anthony J. Sebok
Misunderstanding Positivism, Anthony J. Sebok
Michigan Law Review
It is important that I point out the limited purposes of this article. I cannot, in the context of the argument I make, prove that positivism will not inevitably collapse into a conservative theory of law. Nor can I prove that positivism is not vulnerable to jurisprudential arguments unrelated to the attempt to link positivism with formalism, legal process, and originalism. I recognize that strong arguments have been made that modem positivism's attempts to divorce itself from classical positivism's command theory of law has opened up more problems than it has solved. I have certain views on whether that divorce …
Positivism Regained, Nihilism Postponed, Jose E. Alvarez
Positivism Regained, Nihilism Postponed, Jose E. Alvarez
Michigan Journal of International Law
Review of Law-Making in the International Community by G.M. Danilenko
Legal Theory And The Problem Of Definition, Philip E. Soper
Legal Theory And The Problem Of Definition, Philip E. Soper
Reviews
Natural Law and Natural Rights is a refreshingly direct book about some decidedly difficult matters. It is also a book that refuses to do homage to the complexity of its subject by limiting the topics covered. Here is virtually a mini-treatise in moral philosophy, with illuminating discussions on the whole range of human value and on a good part of the related range of metaethics, legal theory, political theory, and the problems of methodology in the descriptive social sciences.