Suchergebnisse

Public debates in the language of international law have occurred across the 20th and 21st centuries and have produced a popular form of international law that matters for international practice. This book analyses the people who used international law and how they used it in debates over Australia's participation in the 2003 Iraq War, the Vietnam War and the First World War. It examines texts such as newspapers, parliamentary debates, public protests and other expressions of public opinion. It argues that these interventions produced a form of international law that shares a vocabulary and grammar with the expert forms of that language and distinct competences in order to be persuasive. This longer history also illustrates a move from the use of international legal language as part of collective justifications to the use of international law as an autonomous justification for state action

In her excellent, tightly reasoned "Against Academic Boycotts" (Summer 2007), Martha Nussbaum notes that the "main force of the boycott" is directed against "individual members of the [Israeli] institutions," who are accused of not condemning their "government as much as they might have," among other faults. Although Nussbaum finds this rationale and the boycotting of individuals "both implausible and deeply repugnant to the values of academic life," she also notes "that we can only debate this questioning in a philosophically responsible way if we first offer a principled account of the responsibilities of scholars to engage in public debates." What follows is an attempt to answer Nussbaum's implicit question about the responsibility of scholars; an answer that also provides a footnote to her critique of the proposed boycott from a somewhat different perspective.

Abstract