Law - Twentieth-century Schools, International Law, Problems Of Sovereignty, Sovereignty And The International Order
legal ideas theory conventional
The development of law and jurisprudential ideas since the 1970s represents a significant change from the conventional models that had earlier dominated the province of legal theory in the history of ideas. This entry focuses on two salient theoretical emphases that have continued to influence developments of conventional legal theory and postmodern paradigms of legal thought: the analytical tradition, and the jurisprudence inspired by the revolt against formalism, or legal realism.
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Within the received tradition, the rules-based model (which regards law as a pure science), identified with Herbert Lionel Adolphus (H. L. A.) Hart (1907–1992) and the Oxford school of analytical positivism, was subjected to both strong internal critique and important development by such figures as Ronald Dworkin, a Yale law professor who later became professor of jurisprudence in Oxford. D…
McDougal, Lasswell, and W. Michael Reisman sought to apply jurisprudential insights and ideas directly to the study of international law. Apart from the relevance of context, the problem orientation, and the salience of multiple methods of inquiry about law, their approach stressed the importance of specific intellectual criteria for the study of jurisprudence in international law. These criteria …
The model for expanding the community of nation-states became the model of a sovereignty-dominated world order, which included the new Afro-Asian sovereigns. This model was largely Eurocentric, and its juridical roots are often identified with the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The claims about sovereignty now represented a paradox. Colonial sovereignty was to be seen as weaker and permeable: "…
Sovereignty is ambiguously defined in the Charter of the United Nations. The first principle holds that the charter derives its legitimacy from the people of the earth-space community, but the constitutional scheme is weighted heavily in favor of the state-sovereignty paradigm, and limits, in some significant measure, the role of nongovernmental participation. Membership is open to sovereign state…
The conceptual positioning of national sovereignty within the framework of constituting authority and control permits us now to see the importance of the fact that there are many other participants in the global community, power, and constitutive process. As a technical matter, the question of whether an international organization, such as the United Nations, could have an international legal pers…
Central problems emerged—at least in theory—with regard to how to justify the principle of respect as the cornerstone of the principle of human dignity. It is unclear whether the concept of human dignity can itself be objectively justified, and indeed modern philosophers have even suggested that at a fundamental level, human values about dignity may be incommensurable. Apparently con…
One of the most important factors influencing international society in the early 2000s is the principle of globalism. The impact of globalism on sovereignty is fueled by the vast growth in the flow of goods, services, capital, and labor across state and national lines. This process has been dramatically accelerated by the communications revolution, and the impact on state sovereignty suggests that…
Charter of Paris for A New Europe, 21 November 1990. In International Legal Materials 30 (1991): 190 ff. Also available at www.ejil.org. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, opened for signature Mar. 1, 1980, G.A. Res. 34/180, U.N. GAOR, 34th Sess., Supp. No. 46, at 193, U.N. Doc. A/34/46 (1979), 1249 U.N.T.S. 13, reprinted in 19 I.L.M. 33 (1980) (entered int…
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