IS INTERNATIONAL LAW REALLY LAW?

Is international law really law?

Is international law really law?

There are different perceptions of the people about the international law. Some people want to call it a law and som do not agree to it. International law is a body of laws, regulations, and accepted practices by which different nations throughout the world interact with each other as well as with their own citizens and citizens of other countries. There are two basic categories of International Law, public International Law and private International Law, although the two tend to overlap frequently.

Public International Law deals with relationships between different nations or between a nation and persons from another country. Private International Law generally deals with individual concerns, such as civil or human rights issues, not only between a government and its own citizens but also in how its citizens are treated by other nations. Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner argued in their 2004 book, The Limits of International Law, that international law was really just policy, that modern nation states may sign a lot of treaties and agreements but a study of their conduct suggests that they don't feel bound by them. Your book comes to just the opposite conclusion. Explain the different approaches you used and how you came to opposed results.( Dixon 2007 45)

Goldsmith and Posner based their conclusions on selective use of anecdotal case studies, and their identification of the motivations of the decision makers is based entirely on conjecture. They made no attempt to penetrate the black box of foreign-policy decision making. In contrast, our research was based on a series of meetings with the ten living former State Department legal advisers, from the Carter, Reagan, elder Bush, Clinton, and Bush Administrations. The legal advisers provided remarkably candid accounts of the role international law actually played in behind-the-scenes deliberations on foreign policy during the major crises that occurred during their tenure. They confirmed that senior U.S. policy makers of both parties perceived international law as real law, that international legal rules contained in treaties and customary international law are often clear enough to constrain policy preferences, that the policy makers understood that there were serious consequences to violating international law, and that they recognized that it was almost always in America's long-term interest to comply with international law.

The ten former State Department Legal Advisers provided a number of examples spanning thirty years. Examples detailed in the book include President Carter's 1979 decision not to use force against the Iranian Embassy in Washington during the hostage crisis, President Reagan's 1985 decision not to authorize the shooting down of an Egyptian airliner carrying the terrorists responsible for the Achile Lauro cruise-ship hijacking, President Clinton's 1994 decision to halt the supply of counter-narcotics intelligence to the Peruvian air force after it shot down a civilian aircraft, and President Bush's decision to direct the State of Texas not to execute a Mexican national convicted of rape and murder in order to comply with an International Court of Justice ...