A Realistic Jurisprudence of International Law

The vain insistence that international reality must conform to carefully-deduced norms is due in large part to the extension into international law of the coercive habit of thought acquired by lawyers in domestic legal systems. If law and legal theory are to have any useful function in international law beyond the making of value-judgments on the activities of individual States, it is imperative that more attention be given to the testing of conclusions and propositions of law against the prevailing international social reality. The preoccupation with the prescriptive model of international law is often evident in attempts to show that a system is already in existence. One argument that is often made is that the United Nations is similar to a government in many respects. The major areas in which supranational aspirations are evident are the developing areas of international law, such as the protection of human rights, the calls for a new international economic order, and international environmental law.