Law Commons^™

When addressing controversial foreign policy questions, international law scholars in the U.S. persistently frame the debate as a conflict between law and policy. From Vietnam to Afghanistan and beyond, this opposition has dominated and defined the way U.S. legal scholars have used international law to engage with significant foreign affairs at least since the Second World War. In this paper, I argue that the law-versus-policy opposition often leads the debates to a deadlock, constraining and neutralizing the best potential of international law to be both a problem-solving and political tool to respond to novel challenges of international relations. Once the …