| This dissertation confronts two basic theoretical questions about international law: The nature of the international legal regime, and the reality of international legal norms in international affairs. The first issue revolves around the most appropriate means by which to conceptualize international law. In this respect, I argue that conceptions of international law rooted in the agreement of sovereign states dramatically oversimplify the complexities of the international legal order. When we consider limitations on the sovereign power of states, by laws such as those that deal with human rights, as well as the existence of non-state international legal agents, such a view is ultimately untenable. Instead, I argue that international law should be seen as the rules that structure the practices of a specialized group of experts, lawyers, judges and scholars. This view, which I call the non-reductionist approach, is then applied to the fields of international legal personality and the laws of humanitarian intervention.; The second portion my dissertation confronts concerns the reality of international law. Since its inception, the notion of international law has met with a great deal of skepticism and claims that it is “not really law”, but rather is either empty rhetoric or at best a mere code of morality. My approach to this question then seeks to understand the various roles that laws play empirically in the real world of political relations without taking recourse to crude notions such as “power” or “national interest”. Rather than dismissing international law out of hand, I seek to lay down rigorous criteria for determining when international law is really having some kind of effect on the outcome of events. Finally, in the last chapter I consider and reject certain normative arguments against international law such as relativism, republicanism, and the prudential objections of modern diplomats. |
