International Law

International law can be defined as the substantive norms and rules and related procedural codes that govern relations among states, and the conduct of transactions and relationships across national borders. It is one of the fundamental institutions of the international system, simultaneously reaffirming the organization of the world into autonomous states and providing their governments and other international actors with a set of publicly expressed common standards of conduct and procedures, organizing the provision of governance for an increasingly interconnected world. Initially addressing only relations among sovereign (independent) states, its reach expanded during the period 1860–2000 to include interactions of states with intergovernmental organizations and humans (as peoples, ethnic, racial, religious, or indigenous groups, or as individuals) and state regulation of human conduct within the natural environment. Two broad debates in legal philosophy—one focused on whether the term “law” should be defined as a body or rules or as the set of interactions through which rules are made, amended, and applied; and the other on whether “law” denotes commands backed by centralized force or social norms treated as obligatory for all members of a society—continue to influence how scholars approach international law, as will be elaborated in later sections. Given the continuing decentralization of global-level governance, it appears more useful to use the term “international law” to denote a body of rules, procedures, and related doctrines for interpreting them, and the term “international legal system” to denote two sets of related activity, the highly political processes of making, amending, and occasionally discarding rules, and the more rule-bound processes of applying the existing rules to behavior and using them to resolve particular disputes. Though the political and the legal sometimes intertwine, distinguishing between the two helps make sense of the expansion of the rules to cover more issue areas and the expansion of rule-making to include not only the non-Western states returning to independence after European colonial domination but also the activities of nonstate actors. Distinguishing between law and politics also highlights the effects of legal rules as they encourage some possible courses of action while discouraging others. Thus the study of international law today involves three distinct activities: (1) understanding international law as a distinct legal system; (2) understanding the potentials and limits of using it as a technique for organizing and conducting governance; and (3) drawing on it as an intellectual resource for advancing political, economic, social, and moral goals.