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Between The Scylla Of Legal Formalism And The Charybdis Of Policy Conceptualism: Yale's Policy Science And International Law, Hengameh Saberi

Hengameh Saberi

An invisible but enduring legacy of the New Haven School, understood through this paper’s counter-narrative, is a new vista through which to caution against the pitfalls of policy reasoning and to demand its promises. International legal theory has a relatively clear sense about abuse of deduction when found in legal interpretation, but it has little to say about similar defects in policy reasoning. Equally undertheorized are our ideas about the very concept of policy and its place in international legal argumentation. Pursued policy objectives might be principled or flexible and their application flexible or principled. So a combination of principled …