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    From Apology To Utopia - Summary - Review

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    Ara Lim
    Koskenniemi argues that international law should not be viewed as a rigid structure, but as a flexible language. He asserts that competence in international law comes from understanding how rules can be interpreted differently based on changing contexts and connecting rules across different levels of abstraction. Koskenniemi also emphasizes that international lawyers should understand the tension between sovereignty as a factual concept and as a legal construct, and be able to argue both sides of any international legal dispute. He challenges the traditional focus on adjudication in international law and argues the field would be better viewed through the lens of legislation and consensus.

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    From Apology To Utopia - Summary - Review

    Uploaded by

    Ara Lim
    201 views1 page
    Koskenniemi argues that international law should not be viewed as a rigid structure, but as a flexible language. He asserts that competence in international law comes from understanding how rules can be interpreted differently based on changing contexts and connecting rules across different levels of abstraction. Koskenniemi also emphasizes that international lawyers should understand the tension between sovereignty as a factual concept and as a legal construct, and be able to argue both sides of any international legal dispute. He challenges the traditional focus on adjudication in international law and argues the field would be better viewed through the lens of legislation and consensus.

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    From Apology to Utopia_Summary_Review

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    Koskenniemi argues that international law should not be viewed as a rigid structure, but as a flexible language. He asserts that competence in international law comes from understanding how rules can be interpreted differently based on changing contexts and connecting rules across different levels of abstraction. Koskenniemi also emphasizes that international lawyers should understand the tension between sovereignty as a factual concept and as a legal construct, and be able to argue both sides of any international legal dispute. He challenges the traditional focus on adjudication in international law and argues the field would be better viewed through the lens of legislation and consensus.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    201 views1 page

    From Apology To Utopia - Summary - Review

    Uploaded by

    Ara Lim
    Koskenniemi argues that international law should not be viewed as a rigid structure, but as a flexible language. He asserts that competence in international law comes from understanding how rules can be interpreted differently based on changing contexts and connecting rules across different levels of abstraction. Koskenniemi also emphasizes that international lawyers should understand the tension between sovereignty as a factual concept and as a legal construct, and be able to argue both sides of any international legal dispute. He challenges the traditional focus on adjudication in international law and argues the field would be better viewed through the lens of legislation and consensus.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    In the book, From Apology to Utopia, the author shared his views, first, none of

    the standard academic treatments captured the simultaneous sense of the rigorous
    formalism and substantive or political open-endedness or argument about
    international law. Second, there is no good reason why the study of international
    law or aspirations of international lawyers should be limited intellectually or
    politically. According to Koskenniemi, he was disappointed with how the field of
    international was being portrayed as a solid formal structure whose rules,
    principles and, institutions had stable relations with each other. With this book,
    he strives to fix the meaning of individual rules, principles or, institutions in
    some abstract and permanent way, regardless of the changing situations in which
    legal interpretations were produced. To understand the structure of international
    law is to treat it as a language. Competence in international law is the ability to
    connect the rules with other rules at different levels of abstraction and
    communication from one person to another. He reiterates that the key to the
    professional competence of a lawyer is the ability to take opposite sides in any
    international dispute. He also empahized that the politics of international law is
    what competent international lawyers do. This competence is the ability to use
    grammar in order to generate meaning by doing things in argument. For Koskenniemi,
    the grammar takes its starting point from the tension between concreteness and
    normality that structures all competent international legal speech. For a
    professionally competent argument, it must be rooted in a social concept of law, in
    which it claims to emerge from the way international society is. In order to form a
    competent argument in international disputes, he asserts that international lawyers
    should understand that the grammar of soverignty is constituted by the oscillation
    between fact-oriented and law-oriented. It mus reflect some actual authority over
    territory.

    He also challenges on social pragmatics of the legal profession. He pointed out


    that if the focus had been on legislation instead of adjudication, a movement
    towards consensus as the governing principle of international law would have
    emerged. He pressumes that lawyers comes to a normative problem always from some
    prespective, to defend a client, an interest, a theory. Beacuse the field of legal
    argument is constructed in an adversarial manner, in which a defense is meaningful
    only as a defense againsta formal adversary in court, most international lawyers
    share the intuition that the paradigm of their profession lies in arguing in front
    of a court, in favor of a client and against an adversary.

    In closing thsi remarkable and challenging project, he reminds the readers that to
    commit oneself to international law is to allow its grammar to enter as one's
    second nature but still to maintain the position of choice. He showed us the
    professional and passionate approach to understand the structure of international
    legal argumant.

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