International Law - Praise and Criticism

As a scholar one has to be able to give and accept criticism ... and as an international scholar in the United States one can, at times, encounter severe criticism. Just recently, I discovered the "Debate Club" of Legal Affairs [website]. While browsing through its archives, I came across a debate between Eric Posner (Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law at the University of Chicago) and Oona Hathaway (Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School). Topic of this debate was: Is International Law Useful? [text]. But why have a debate on this question? Hasn't international law been necessary and established for centuries?

The reasons for international law skepticism are manifold, but can be ascribed to the very nature of international law, most notably its remoteness and vagueness - both being inevitably interconnected. I have already dealt with the problem of the perceived remoteness of the EU in a previous post. The same is sort of true on a more global level. Why should the citizens of a modern industrial state care about the U.N. when it does not affect them directly? Doesn't it defy the purpose of having an International Court of Justice if hardly anyone knows about it? The latter question also leads to the next point: vagueness. Due to the perceived remoteness, the whole concept of international law tends to be vague to John Doe.

Even if two lawyers mention international law, it is not said that they talk about the same thing - particularly when one comes from Europe and the other from the United States. Thus, international law in the broader sense could theoretically comprise both public international law (i.e., in general parlance, the legal system governing the relationship between nations [see Black's Law Dictionary]) and private international law (i.e. body of jurisprudence that undertakes to reconcile differences between the laws of different states or countries in a case in which a transaction or occurrence central to the case has a connection to two or more jurisdictions [see Black's Law Dictionary].

Yet, again, scholars heavily debate on the accurateness of the term "private international law" as it is merely a part of the private law of each state. Confused? So much for vagueness!