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International or Global Law: An Unachieved Revolution?

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Five Legal Revolutions Since the 17th Century

Part of the book series: Studies in the History of Law and Justice ((SHLJ,volume 1))

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to the issue of a purported triumph of international (or transnational) law that could have created, in the recent decades, a legal revolution minimising the role of domestic legal orders. This question cannot be separated from the historical perspective about what is “international law” (as a coherent and independent legal order) and at what time the first kind of international law has appeared. As a set of positive rules, international law has no far origins (in the Antiquity, Middle Ages and early Modern Times), but is the product of processes beginning during the nineteenth century and leading to partial achievements after 1945. After some attempts to measure the impact of international law, the approach concerning international lawyers and international fora shows that the international legal field has not replaced domestic legal orders.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, Scheurer, Christoph. 1993. The Waning of the Sovereign State: Toward a New Paradigm for International Law. European Journal for International Law 4: 447–471.

  2. 2.

    Nussbaum, Arthur. 1954. A Concise History of the Law of Nations. New York: MacMillan; Grewe, Wilhelm Georg. 1984. Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte. Baden-Baden: Nomos; Ziegler, Karl-Heinz. 1994 and 2007. Völkerrechtsgeschichte: ein Studienbuch. München: Beck; Butkewych, Olga V. 2003. History of Ancient International Law: Challenges and Prospects. Journal of the History of International Law 2: 189–235.

  3. 3.

    Cassayre, Aude. 2003. La Justice dans les cites grecques. De la formation des royaumes hellénistiques au legs d’Attale. Rennes: PUR.

  4. 4.

    Cassayre, as n. 3, 48, 51, 53.

  5. 5.

    Haggenmacher, Peter. 1983. Grotius et la doctrine de la guerre juste. Paris: PUF, 311–320.

  6. 6.

    Contrary to the interpretation of Anand, Ram Prakash. 1983. Origin and Development of the Law of the Sea. History of International Law Revisited. The Hague-Boston-London: Martinus Nijhoff, 7 and 13.

  7. 7.

    Haggenmacher, Peter. 1985 Grotius et le droit international—Le texte et la légende. In Grotius et l’ordre juridique international. Travaux du colloque Hugo Grotius, Genève, 10–11 novembre 1983, eds. Alfred Dufour, Peter Haggenmacher, Jirí Toman. Lausanne: Payot, 115–143.

  8. 8.

    Emer de Vattel, Le droit des gens ou principes de la loi naturelle, Londres, 1758 (Slatkin reprints, Genève, 1983) vol. I, XVII-XX: Vattel was rather doubtful towards the existence of a civitas maxima above the States, a notion that his master Wolff has defended.

  9. 9.

    Koskenniemi, Martti. 2002. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  10. 10.

    Austin, John. 1832 and 1995. The Province of Jurisprudence determined. Ed. Wilfrid E. Rumble. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 123 and 171.

  11. 11.

    Koskenniemi, as n. 9, 457.

  12. 12.

    Kelsen, Hans. 1944 and 2000. Peace Through Law. New York: The Lawbook Exchange, 19–23. If Kelsen’s intuition was that the development of an international judiciary would be easier (and more easily accepted by the States) than the construction of legislative or executive power in the international community, his theoretical conception of an international legal order with a judiciary and without a “legislator” can be questioned according to Hart’s criteria of secondary rules.

  13. 13.

    In fact, the treaty was signed on June 26, 1945, by the representatives of 50 founding member States. Poland joined a few months later.

  14. 14.

    Oraá, Jaime Oraá. 2009. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In International Human Rights Law in a Global Context, eds. Felipe Gómez Isa and Koen de Feyter. Bilbao: University of Deusto, 226–228: it can be argued also that the State members of the UN (including the new States that did not exist in 1948) have reaffirmed, through the 1993 Vienna Declaration, their commitment in favour or the UDHR and that more than 90 constitutions in the world are making references to this text.

  15. 15.

    The idea of a “hidden constitution” is not novel and has been proposed, in different countries (USA, UK, India for example) to show that the current way of interpreting the constitution is quite different from the “official” constitution. The concept is also applicable to international law, where one can see that certain articles of the UN Charter are either ignored or interpreted in a controversial way.

  16. 16.

    Koskenniemi, Martti. 2007. La Politique du droit international. Paris: Pedone, 103.

  17. 17.

    A resolution of the General Assembly, voted on the November 17, 1989, declared “the period 1990–1999 the UN Decade of International Law”.

  18. 18.

    Koskenniemi, as n. 16, 141.

  19. 19.

    Koskenniemi, as n. 16, 57.

  20. 20.

    Hart, Herbert Lionel Adolphus. 1961. The Concept of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 229.

  21. 21.

    Aspremont, Jean d’. 2011. Non State Actors from the perspective of legal positivism. In Participants in the International Legal System. Multiple Perspectives on Non State Actors in International Law, ed. Jean d’Aspremont. New York: Routledge, 29.

  22. 22.

    Manual on International Courts and Tribunals. 2004 and 2010. Eds. Ruth Mackenzie, Cesare P. R. Romano, Yuval Shany, Philippe Sands. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 34.

  23. 23.

    Manual (as n. 22), 67.

  24. 24.

    WTO website (www.wto.org), dispute settlement, current statute of disputes.

  25. 25.

    Hoda, Anward. 2012. Dispute Settlement in the WTO, Developing Countries and India. ICRIER Policy Series 15: 12.

  26. 26.

    List of concluded cases: https://icsid.worldbank.org.

  27. 27.

    Manual on International Courts, as n. 22, 149.

  28. 28.

    Teubner, Gunter. 2002. Breaking Frames: Economic Globalisation and the Emergence of lex mercatoria. European Journal of Social Theory 5: 199–217; Stone Sweet, Alec. 2006. The new Lex Mercatoria and transnational governance. Journal of European Public Policy 13/5: 627–646.

  29. 29.

    A Europe of Rights. 2008. eds. Alec Stone Sweet and Helen Keller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 12.

  30. 30.

    The Barrios Altos v. Peru case, judged by the IACtHR in 2001 (about the violation of the convention through a statute of limitations for war crimes and crimes against humanity) is probably the most influential and the most cited decision, in different South American countries: Nollkaemper, André. 2011. National Courts and the International Rule of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 201 and 237.

  31. 31.

    It is so in many African States that have adopted the French monist system, but whose judges are reluctant to consider several clauses of international conventions as self-executing: Viljoen, Frans. 2012. International Human Rights Law in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 520.

  32. 32.

    Such was the case regarding the Convention on the Rights of [the] Child, which the French Court of Cassation deemed not “self-executing” until two decisions of 2005 (May, 18), following a long delay the case law of the Council of State on this matter. Some articles of the ICSECR are also considered as non self-executing in France.

  33. 33.

    Nollkaemper, as n. 29), 79.

  34. 34.

    Wet, Erika de. 2008. The Reception Process in Netherlands and Belgium. In A Europe of Rights, op. cit. (as n. 28), 243.

  35. 35.

    Wiklund, Ola. 2008. The Reception process in Sweden and Norway. In A Europe of Rights, op. cit. (as n. 28), 176 and 188.

  36. 36.

    Neuman, Gerald L. 2012. The Brakes that Failed: Constitutional Restrictions of International Agreements in France. Cornell International Law Journal 45: 306

  37. 37.

    Dutheillet de Lamothe, Olivier. 2007. Contrôle de constitutionnalité et contrôle de conventionnalité. In Mélanges Daniel Labetoulle. Paris: Dalloz, 315–327.

  38. 38.

    In fact, like the decisions of US Supreme Court setting aside a US statutory law, such decisions have practically the effect to strike down the concerned law.

  39. 39.

    Gouttes, Régis de. 2011. La naissance du droit européen des droits de l’homme et le rôle du “monde de la convention”. Le point de vue d’un juge français (2). In Les droits de l’homme ont-ils constitutionnalisé le monde? eds. Stépahnie Hennette-Vauchez, Jean-Marc Sorel. Bruxelles: Buylant, 123–124.

  40. 40.

    The International Law in Domestic Countries (ILDC) Database, edited by Erika de Wet and André Nollkaemper (and published by Oxford University Press) gathers the main decision of domestic courts concerning international law since 2000.

  41. 41.

    Belgian Court of Cassation, ING v. B. I, 2nd of March 2007, C.05.0154.N/1.

  42. 42.

    De Wet, as n. 33, 241; Nollkaemper, as n. 29, 204 about a 1998 decision setting aside dispositions from the Criminal Code deemed inconsistent with a 1868 Maritime Treaty.

  43. 43.

    For this reason, one can ask if there was really a case of “disapplication” of national law.

  44. 44.

    Nollkaemper, as n. 29, 202.

  45. 45.

    Requa, Marny A. 2012. A Human Rights Triumph? Dictatorship-era Crimes and the Chilean Supreme Court. Human Rights Law Review 12/1: 79–106.

  46. 46.

    Constitutional Court of Indonesia, Edith Yunita Stanturi v. Indonesia, 2–3/PUUV/2007.

  47. 47.

    Candela Soriano, Mercedes. 2008. The Reception Process in Spain and in Italy. In A Europe of Rights, (as n. 27), 406.

  48. 48.

    Krisch, Nico. 2010. Beyond Constitutionalism: the Pluralist Structure of Post-National Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 127.

  49. 49.

    Reed, Lucy and Granoff, Ilmy. 2009. Treaties in US Domestic Law: Medellín v. Texas in Context. The Law and Practice of International Courts and Tribunals 8/1: 1–26.

  50. 50.

    Bailleux, Antoine. 2005. La compétence universelle au carrefour de la pyramides des normes. De l’expérience belge à l’exigence d’une justice pénale internationale. Bruxelles: Bruylant.

  51. 51.

    Mattei, Ugo. 2003. A Theory of Imperial Law: A Study on U.S. Hegemony and Latin Resistance. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 10: 383–420.

  52. 52.

    Dezalay, Yves. 2012. Marchands de droit. La restructuration de l’ordre juridique international par les multinationales du droit. Paris: Fayard.

  53. 53.

    Thomas, P A.(Ed). 1992. Tomorrow’s Lawyers. Oxford: Blackwell, 7 and 61.

  54. 54.

    Dezalay, Yves and Garth, Bryant F. 2010. Asian Legal Revivals: Lawyers in the Shadow of Empire. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

  55. 55.

    Dezalay, Yves and Garth, Bryant F. 2002. La mondialisation des guerres de palais. Paris: Seuil, 97–98.

  56. 56.

    Keck, Margaret E. and Sikkink, Kathryn. 1998. Activity Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 88.

  57. 57.

    Dezalay, and Garth (as n. 53), 103.

  58. 58.

    McEvoy, Kieran and Rebouche, Rachel. 2007. Mobilizing the Professions: Lawyers, Politics and the Collective Legal Conscience. In Judges, Transition and Human Rights, eds. John Morison, Kieran McEvoy, Gordon Anthony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 275–314.

  59. 59.

    Sarat, Austin and Scheingold, Stuart (eds.). 2001. Cause Lawyering and the State in a Global Era/ New York: Oxford University Press, especially Stephen Meili. Latin-America Cause Lawyering Networks, 307–333.

  60. 60.

    Kinley, David (ed.). 2009. Human Rights and Corporations. Burlington: Ashgate.

  61. 61.

    Kesby, Alison. 2012. The Right to have Rights: Citizenship, Humanity and International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 113.

  62. 62.

    Jhering, Rudolf von. 1852 and 1969. L’Esprit du droit romain (French translat. O. de Meleunaere, Bologna, 1969), 69 (vol. 2, book 2, § 32).

  63. 63.

    Jellinek, Georg. 1911. Der Kampf des alten Rechts mit dem neuen Recht. In Ausgewählte Schriften und Reden, Berlin, 392–427.

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  1. Department of Social Sciences, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

    Jean-Louis Halpérin

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Halpérin, JL. (2014). International or Global Law: An Unachieved Revolution?. In: Five Legal Revolutions Since the 17th Century. Studies in the History of Law and Justice, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05888-7_5

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