Content area
Full Text
Constructivism, Positivism, and Empiricism in International Law
LEGAL RULES AND INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY. By Anthony Clark Arend. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. ix, 208. $35.00
To paraphrase Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: All happy disciplines are content in much the same way; disaffected fields are unhappy in their own particular fashion.1 International law and international relations are bickering spouses in a paradigmatic dysfunctional family. Of the two, international law has the older academic pedigree, but international relations emerged as a vibrant discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. It is hard to believe that until World War Two they were unified fields of study, a happy family of contented scholars. Academic international lawyers held appointments in political science and government departments in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in Continental Europe, while non-attorneys often taught international law on legal faculties. Like blissful newlyweds, international law academics and international relations (IR) theorists engaged in a common program of research and shared the same epistemic sense of the world. A suggestion in the 1920s or 1930s that this couple would later be estranged would have been laughable and downright unromantic. But, alas, that is what has come to pass.
Indeed, to say that international law and international relations have had a messy divorce would be a charitable understatement. A marriage counselor might have seen early signs that the relationship was doomed. A marriage where one spouse acts like Peter Pan, and the other like Cruella deVille, cannot be good. After World War Two, international relations theorists became cynical and embittered. The realist bent of much post-War scholarship had no truck for a purported "rule of law" in international relations. After skepticism came detachment; the strong empiricism and quantitative methods of IR were off-putting for almost all international lawyers. On the other side of the ledger, IR theorists thought international law academics were living in a fool's paradise. For many years-in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s-international law academics and international relations theorists quite literally did not converse with each other. They simply had nothing to say.
Into this dysfunctional scholarly family-and its intellectual discourse-- comes Professor Anthony Clark Arend's slim, but important, new book, Legal Rules and International Society.3 It appears at a crucial, if...