Law Commons^™

International Organizations And Customary International Law, Sir Michael Wood

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

My subject today is "International Organizations and Customary International Law"--that is, the role of international organizations in relation to the formation and determination of rules of customary international law. Charney devoted a good part of his well-known article on "Universal International Law" to what he termed "contemporary international law-making." By that, he meant chiefly law-making within "international forums"--that is, within organs of international organizations and at international conferences. He starts the discussion from the somewhat heretical position that

"[w]hile customary law is still created in the traditional way, that process has increasingly given way in recent years to a more …