Bottom-Up International Lawmaking: Reflections on the New Haven School of International Law

Abstract

I am struck by the similarities between the present moment and the one that sparked the New Haven School of International Law. Today, many international legal scholars find themselves sandwiched by intellectual and geopolitical currents highly reminiscent of those that gave birth to the New Haven School. On the one hand, the New Haven School was a response to Cold War realism, a philosophy "which underestimates the role of rules, and of legal processes in general, and over-emphasizes the importance of naked power." International law is now besieged by a neo-conservative, nationalist ideology, an ideology hauntingly similar to the Cold War realism of the 1950s and 1960s, that gives little (if any) independent normative weight to international law and instead conceives of it as a mere tool in furtherance of the "national interest" and power politics.