A World Transformed

Abstract

Two decades ago, while Richard Nixon was President and the Vietnam War still raged, ten energetic Yale law students founded Yale Studies in World Public Order. The prologue to their first issue, painstakingly typed and mulitlithed, announced the journal's commitment "to publishing articles which contribute to the understanding of [a] highly interrelated global process." The lead article, entitled The New Haven School of International Law: An Invitation to a Policy-Oriented Jurisprudence, observed: The New Haven school does not describe the world's different community decision processes through a dichotomy of national and international law, in terms of the relative supremacy of one system of rules or other interrelations of rules. Instead, it describes them in terms of the interpenetration of multiple processes of authoritative decision of varying territorial compass .... [i]nternational law is most realistically observed, not as a mere rigid set of rules but as the whole process of authoritative decision in which patterns of authority and patterns of control are appropriately conjoined.