Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2022
Abstract
International Law and the Politics of History is nothing short of cri de coeur directed at international lawyers and historians, the two disciplinary co-conspirators in international law's so-called turn to history. Rather than embracing what appears to be a mutually beneficial model of interdisciplinary collaboration, Anne Orford instead sees international lawyers as evading their responsibilities as decisionmakers-and indeed makers of both the discipline and its underlying norms-and historians as self-satisfied purveyors of truths that they themselves know are contested and instrumental. As much as she blames historians for acting with blinders, her main audience is international lawyers (mostly the academic ones), whom she implores to be true to their realist-and in some cases criticalsensibilities. Those commitments stem from our training as problem-solvers, international law's own doctrinal engagement with history, and key intellectual influences of the twentieth century, and accept that law is political "all the way down."1As a result, international lawyers have the skills to engage in normatively oriented decisionmaking and scholarship rather than seeking some external validation from historians.
Recommended Citation
Ratner, Steven. "Not Just the Historians: Anne Orford’s Insights and the Suspicion Between International Law and Philosophy." Temple International and Comparative Law Journal 36 (2022): 163-172.
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