The Destiny of International Law

Abstract

In much international legal scholarship, Iraq stands for what lies beyond the UN Charter – a world in which international institutions have proved unable to challenge the pragmatists of the new American empire, or one in which international institutions must be remade to suit the interests of the only state capable of acting as the sovereign enforcer of the law. Yet this sense of a crisis of legal authority is not novel for international law – rather, it pervades the discipline. Seen in this light, the inability of the United Nations either to prevent the use of force against Iraq, or to develop an effective multilateral response to terrorism, is simply another manifestation of that crisis, ..