Year: 2000
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Introductory RemarksThe contributions in this book on multilateral treaty-making emerged from Forum Geneva, held jointly by the American Society of International Law and the Graduate Institute oflnternational Studies in Geneva on May 16, 1998.The subtitle, "The Current Status of Challenges to, and Reforms Needed in, the International Legislative Process", indicates that multilateral treaty-making has not been examined in a static sense, but placed against the backdrop of the interaction between international legal system and social change.There is no need for any reminder of the vast political, economic, social and technological transformations which have taken place and are still in process in this past decade, although I will refrain from all references to globalization in this context.(In fact, the Forum proceedings took place against the noisy background of anti-WTO demonstrators.)But there are of course different ways of envisaging this exchange between Jaw and society.One can envisage the legal system as a kind of self-contained black box containing a coherently ordered set of structural and normative arrangements, the systemic character of which can be conceptualized in various ways, such as in the formalist terms of Kelsen's linear pyramidal structure, for whom the fundamental norm serves as a boundary between the legal system and its extrasystemic social environment, or Herbert Hart's union between primary and secondary rules.Within this self-regulating system, law provides its own means of validation (or its sources or rules of recognition) and sanctions violations of its binding norms.From this perspective the international lawyer need not be overly concerned with social change.One can on the other hand view international law as instrumental, there to promote certain finalities and/or underlying values and interests.From this perspective, the legal system becomes synonymous with the notion of legal order, in the sense of a particular substantive content surfacing at any one time and hence dynamic in the sense of responding to the changing configuration and requirements of the component parts of international society.It has been pointed out that it is particularly at a time of growing divergence between social mores and legal institutions that doctrine tends to approach the in-V.Gowlland-Debbas (ed.), Multilateral Treaty-making, 1-9.
Source: Brill | Nijhoff eBooks
Author: Vera Gowlland-Debbas
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4318610041