Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Conclusion: Icarus

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Plurality Trilemma

Part of the book series: Philosophy, Public Policy, and Transnational Law ((PPPTL))

  • 251 Accesses

Abstract

This concluding chapter argues that the current structure of global legal thought raises concerns about the role of academics. Suggesting a regulative frame for academic engagement, this chapter recommends a return of the global legal academic to its core functions. It argues that a practical turn that implicitly rather than explicitly takes account of the collected theoretical knowledge could help to improve the coordination in circumstances of plurality.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Chap. 2.2.

  2. 2.

    Chap. 2.3.

  3. 3.

    Chap. 6.5.

  4. 4.

    See initially, Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious – Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 5.

  5. 5.

    Aristotle , Nicomachean Ethics , trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), Book I, 1094b.

  6. 6.

    Iain Scobbie ends his take on the theory of international law with a quote from historian Tony Judt: “If everything is ‘political,’ then nothing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lecture on contemporary literature. ‘What about the woman question?’ someone asked. Stein’s reply should be emblazoned on every college notice board from Boston to Berkeley: ‘Not everything can be about everything.’” See, Iain Scobbie, “A View from Delft: Some Thoughts about Thinking about International Law,” in International Law, 4th ed., ed. Malcolm Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 80, citing Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet (London: Heinemann, 2010), 189–90.

  7. 7.

    See, on this reading of Foucault and Schmitt , Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, “Nothing is Political, Everything Can Be Politicized: On the Concept of the Political in Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt,” Telos 142 (2008): 135.

  8. 8.

    See, Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  9. 9.

    See also, Jean D’Aspremont, “Martti Koskenniemi, the Mainstream, and Self-Reflectivity,” Leiden Journal of International Law 29, no. 3 (2016): 625. For a different opinion, see Andrea Bianchi, International Law Theories – An Inquiry into Different Ways of Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 6, who seems to believe that international law is still non-theoretical.

  10. 10.

    See, Oscar Schachter, “The Invisible College of International Lawyers,” Northwestern University Law Review 72, no. 2 (1977–78): 217.

  11. 11.

    See, for a defense of this mechanism in the United Nations, Pierre-Marie Dupuy, “Some Brief Conclusions,” in System, Order, and International Law – The Early History of International Legal Thought, eds. Stefan Kadelbach, Thomas Kleinlein and David Roth-Isigkeit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 505.

  12. 12.

    Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement, reprint (London: Verso, 2015), 96f.

  13. 13.

    Bianchi, International Law Theories, 6.

  14. 14.

    For illustration, David Roth-Isigkeit, “The Blinkered Discipline? – Martti Koskenniemi and Interdisciplinary Approaches to International Law,” International Theory 9, no. 3 (2017), 410.

  15. 15.

    See, for a discussion on the focus on self-reflection, Euan MacDonald, International Law and Ethics after the Critical Challenge: Framing the Legal Within the Post-Foundational (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2011), 23f. See also, D’Aspremont, “Martti Koskenniemi,” 638–39.

  16. 16.

    Matthew Windsor, “Consigliere or Conscience? The Role of the Government Legal Adviser,” in International Law as a Profession, ed. Jean d’Aspremont et al. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017), 355–88.

  17. 17.

    Gleider Hernández, “The Responsibility of the International Legal Academic,” in International Law as a Profession, ed. Jean d’Aspremont et al. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2017), 160–88.

  18. 18.

    For this narrative, see Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations – The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See also, Anne Orford, “International Law and the Limits of History,” The Law of International Lawyers: Reading Martti Koskenniemi, eds. Wouter Werner, Marieke de Hoon and Alexis Galán (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 297.

  19. 19.

    Other perspectives seem more suitable to solve this legitimacy problem. With its radical democratic approach, post-modern Luhmannianism offers a bottom-up constitution of global order. This radical form, however, involves a perspective against the state or other forms of constituted communities. In the absence of a Habermasian proceduralist solution to bridge the legitimacy gaps between the different governance levels, the trilemmatic structure even returns in the question whether global academic governance is legitimate in one or the other form.

  20. 20.

    Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 30.

  21. 21.

    Martti Koskeniemmi diagnosed and criticized an ethical turn, in Martti Koskenniemi, “The Lady Doth Protest Too Much – Kosovo, and the Turn to Ethics in International Law” Modern Law Review 65, no. 2 (2002): 170.

  22. 22.

    For illustration, see Roth-Isigkeit, “The Blinkered Discipline?” 410.

  23. 23.

    Christian Reus-Smit, “The Politics of International Law,” in The Politics of International Law, ed. Christian Reus-Smit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 37–38.

  24. 24.

    Roth-Isigkeit, “The Blinkered Discipline?” 410.

  25. 25.

    In a German international law blog, the Völkerrechtsblog, there is a section that is called Practioner’s Corner. Though inadvertently, the authors provide for a strong illustration of the turn away from practice.

  26. 26.

    Cicero , On the Orator – Books 1–2, trans. Edward William Sutton and Harris Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), 1.3.12.

  27. 27.

    For Karl Popper, Plato is responsible for this negative view through his attacks on the Sophists. See, Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 5th edn. (London: Routledge, 1966), 130f.

  28. 28.

    Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 84–85.

  29. 29.

    Plato , Gorgias , ed. Eric Robertson Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 326a.

  30. 30.

    Vickers, In Defence, 200–201.

  31. 31.

    Vickers, In Defence, 161.

  32. 32.

    See, for an overview, Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 285f. See also Iain Scobbie, “Rhetoric, Persuasion, and Interpretation in International Law,” Interpretation in International Law, eds. Andrea Bianchi, Daniel Peat and Matthew Windsor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 62–64, who refers to concepts by Ivor Armstrong Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936); James Boyd White, “Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law: The Arts of Cultural and Communal Life,” University of Chicago Law Review 52 (1985): 684; Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991).

  33. 33.

    For an introduction, see Martin J. Osborne and Ariel Rubinstein, A Course in Game Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 133f.

  34. 34.

    Antonio Cassese, “Introduction,” in Realizing Utopia: The Future of International Law, ed. Antonio Cassese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xxi.

  35. 35.

    Scobbie, “Rhetoric,” 71.

  36. 36.

    Elsewhere, I have argued that the processes of standard-setting in the Human Rights Committee proceed in a very similar way. David Roth-Isigkeit, “Die General Comments des Menschenrechtsausschusses der Vereinten Nationen – ein Beitrag zur Analyse der Rechtsentwicklung im Völkerrecht,” MenschenRechtsMagazin 17, no. 2 (2012): 196.

  37. 37.

    As Stefan Kadelbach has noted, this “order through system” is a trait that already appears in the scholarship of Hugo Grotius. See, Stefan Kadelbach, “Hugo Grotius: On the Conquest of Utopia through Systematic Reasoning,” in System, Order, and International Law – The Early History of International Legal Thought, eds. Stefan Kadelbach, Thomas Kleinlein, and David Roth-Isigkeit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 157–58.

  38. 38.

    Yet, I have suggested how theories of argumentation might be suitable to overcome conflicts of legal orders. See, David Roth-Isigkeit, “Promises and Perils of Legal Argument – A Discursive Approach to Normative Conflict Between Legal Orders,” Revue Belge de Droit International, no. 2 (2014): 96.

  39. 39.

    Frédéric Mégret, “In Search of International Impartiality,” ESIL Reflections 4, no. 8 (2015): 3.

  40. 40.

    See Ian Hurd, “Enchanted and Disenchanted International Law,” Global Policy 7, no. 1 (2016): 96.

  41. 41.

    Steven R. Ratner, “International Law’s Impartiality – Myth and Reality,” EJILTALK!, 26 October 2015, available at http://www.ejiltalk.org/international-laws-impartiality-myth-and-reality/

  42. 42.

    Isabel Feichtner, “Realizing Utopia Through the Practice of International Law,” European Journal of International Law 23, no. 4 (2012): 1143.

  43. 43.

    Martti Koskenniemi “Between Commitment and Cynicism: Outline of a Theory of International Law as Practice,” in Collection of Essays by Legal Advisers of States, Legal Advisers of International Organizations and Practitioners in the Field of International Law, ed. United Nations (New York: United Nations, 1999), 495.

  44. 44.

    Oscar Schachter, “The International Civil Servant: Neutrality and Responsibility,” in Dag Hammarskjöld Revisited, ed. Robert S. Jordan (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1983), 47.

  45. 45.

    See Pål Wrange, “Neutrality, Impartiality and our Responsibility to Uphold International Law,” in The Law of War – The Law as it was and the law as it should be, ed. Pål Wrange and Ola Engdahl (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2008), 278.

  46. 46.

    Oscar Schachter, “Dag Hammarskjöld and the Relation of Law to Politics,” American Journal of International Law 56, no. 1 (1962): 1.

  47. 47.

    Mónica García-Salmones remarks, in her biography of Kelsen , that “[t]he most authentic experience that Kelsen observed, in political, economical, and sociological life, was that individuals or states were constantly struggling for their interests.” Kelsen tried to avoid this struggle through an excessive clarity of the law. Mónica García-Salmones, The Project of Positivism in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 129.

  48. 48.

    Bianchi, International Law Theories, 7.

Bibliography

  • Aristotle. 1962. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Martin Ostwald. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bianchi, Andrea. 2016. International Law Theories – An Inquiry into Different Ways of Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Cassese, Antonio. 2012. Introduction. In Realizing Utopia: The Future of International Law, ed. Antonio Cassese, xvii–xxii. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Cicero. 1942. On the Orator – Books 1–2. Trans. Edward William Sutton and Harris Rackham. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Conley, Thomas M. 1990. Rhetoric in the European Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • D’Aspremont, Jean. 2016. Martti Koskenniemi, the Mainstream, and Self-Reflectivity. Leiden Journal of International Law 29 (3): 625–639.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid. 2008. Nothing Is Political, Everything Can Be Politicized: On the Concept of the Political in Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt. Telos 142: 135–161.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dupuy, Pierre-Marie. 2017. Some Brief Conclusions. In System, Order, and International Law – The Early History of International Legal Thought, ed. Stefan Kadelbach, Thomas Kleinlein, and David Roth-Isigkeit, 505–511. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feichtner, Isabel. 2012. Realizing Utopia Through the Practice of International Law. European Journal of International Law 23 (4): 1143–1157.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • García-Salmones, Mónica. 2013. The Project of Positivism in International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hernández, Gleider. 2017. The Responsibility of the International Legal Academic. In International Law as a Profession, ed. Jean d’Aspremont et al., 160–188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Hurd, Ian. 2016. Enchanted and Disenchanted International Law. Global Policy 7 (1): 96–101.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jameson, Frederic. 1981. The Political Unconscious – Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Judt, Tony. 2010. The Memory Chalet. London: Heinemann.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kadelbach, Stefan. 2017. Hugo Grotius: On the Conquest of Utopia Through Systematic Reasoning. In System, Order, and International Law – The Early History of International Legal Thought, ed. Stefan Kadelbach, Thomas Kleinlein, and David Roth-Isigkeit, 134–159. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kant, Immanuel. 1993. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, 3rd edn. Trans. James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Koskenniemi, Martti. 1999. Between Commitment and Cynicism: Outline of a Theory of International Law as Practice. In Collection of Essays by Legal Advisers of States, Legal Advisers of International Organizations and Practitioners in the Field of International Law, ed. United Nations, 495–523. New York: United Nations.

    Google Scholar 

  • Koskenniemi, Martti. 2002. The Lady Doth Protest Too Much – Kosovo, and the Turn to Ethics in International Law. Modern Law Review 65 (2): 159–175.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2006. From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations – The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacDonald, Euan. 2011. International Law and Ethics After the Critical Challenge: Framing the Legal Within the Post-foundational. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Mégret, Frédéric. 2015. In Search of International Impartiality. ESIL Reflections 4 (8): 1–6.

    Google Scholar 

  • Orford, Anne. 2017. International Law and the Limits of History. In The Law of International Lawyers: Reading Martti Koskenniemi, ed. Wouter Werner, Marieke de Hoon, and Alexis Galán, 297–320. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Osborne, Martin J., and Ariel Rubinstein. 1994. A Course in Game Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Perelman, Chaïm, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1991. The New Rhetoric. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plato. 1990. In Gorgias, ed. Eric Robertson Dodds. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Popper, Karl. 1966. The Open Society and Its Enemies. 5th ed. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ratner, Steven R. 2015. International Law’s Impartiality – Myth and Reality. EJILTALK!, October 26. http://www.ejiltalk.org/international-laws-impartiality-myth-and-reality/

  • Reus-Smit, Christian. 2004. The Politics of International Law. In The Politics of International Law, ed. Christian Reus-Smit, 14–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Richards, Ivor Armstrong. 1936. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roth-Isigkeit, David. 2012. Die General Comments des Menschenrechtsausschusses der Vereinten Nationen – ein Beitrag zur Analyse der Rechtsentwicklung im Völkerrecht. MenschenRechtsMagazin 17 (2): 196–210.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2014. Promises and Perils of Legal Argument: A Discursive Approach to Conflicting Legal Orders. Revue Belge de Droit International 2: 96–115.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2017. The Blinkered Discipline? – Martti Koskenniemi and Interdisciplinary Approaches to International Law. International Theory 9 (3): 410–435.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schachter, Oscar. 1962. Dag Hammarskjöld and the Relation of Law to Politics. American Journal of International Law 56 (1): 1–8.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1977–78. The Invisible College of International Lawyers. Northwestern University Law Review 72(2): 217–226.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1983. The International Civil Servant: Neutrality and Responsibility. In Dag Hammarskjöld Revisited, ed. Robert S. Jordan, 39–63. Durham: Carolina Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scobbie, Iain. 2014. A View from Delft: Some Thoughts About Thinking About International Law. In International Law, ed. Malcolm Evans, 4th ed., 53–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2015. Rhetoric, Persuasion, and Interpretation in International Law. In Interpretation in International Law, ed. Andrea Bianchi, Daniel Peat, and Matthew Windsor, 61–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. 2015. The Critical Legal Studies Movement. London: Verso. (Reprint).

    Google Scholar 

  • Vickers, Brian. 1998. In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • White, James Boyd. 1985. Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law: The Arts of Cultural and Communal Life. University of Chicago Law Review 52: 684–702.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Windsor, Matthew. 2017. Consigliere or Conscience? The Role of the Government Legal Adviser. In International Law as a Profession, ed. Jean d’Aspremont et al., 355–388. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Wrange, Pål. 2008. Neutrality, Impartiality and Our Responsibility to Uphold International Law. In The Law of War – The Law as It Was and the Law as It Should Be, ed. Pål Wrange and Ola Engdahl, 273–292. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Normative Orders, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany

    David Roth-Isigkeit

Authors
  1. David Roth-Isigkeit
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Roth-Isigkeit, D. (2018). Conclusion: Icarus. In: The Plurality Trilemma. Philosophy, Public Policy, and Transnational Law. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72856-8_7

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation