Conference: What is Wrong with the Way We Teach and Write International Law?

The Association of American Law Schools and the American Society of International Law will host a joint conference in Vancouver, June 17-20, 2007, on What is Wrong with the Way We Teach and Write International Law? The conference program is here. Why attend?

The world is moving so quickly - globalization of trade, terrorist attacks, global warming, preemptive invasions, international courts springing up around the globe - and the law necessarily changes to keep up with it. No one can keep abreast of the ever-evolving face of international law, much less pause and reflect on how these developments affect the way we teach and write about it.

This is the first AALS Mid-Year Conference on Teaching International Law in 11 years. It will bring together teachers and scholars for three days of intensive discussion on how we teach and write about international law and where the field is heading. There will be plenary sessions, small group discussions, and paper resentations. The panelists, drawn from the most highly respected scholars in their arious fields, will be around for the entire conference, enabling conversations to ontinue long after the formal discussions have ended.

We will start by asking - not ourselves but other scholars - “What is wrong with what we do?” The opening panel will look at international law teaching and scholarship from the outside - economics, sociology, political science, literature - and offer critiques on its academic value. Other panels will critique international law scholarship from a variety of perspectives, consider the future of the core international curriculum in the face of increasing specialization, and discuss the teaching of ethics and the ethics of teaching international law, especially in clinical settings.

Teachers of other subjects can benefit as well. The internationalization of the legal profession has reached the classroom. Globalizing the law school curriculum has meant not only adding courses and specializations in international law, but adding international and comparative components to core subjects or, even better, approaching them from a wider perspective. More and more, international law is becoming relevant to domestic law as Congress and agencies enact legislation and regulations implementing international obligations, as domestic law must reflect the reality that it is applied more and more in transnational contexts. It is becoming harder to find a field of trade or legal practice unaffected by international commerce, foreign competition law, and international financial and trade regulation. An intensive exchange with international legal teachers and scholars will suggest ways of incorporating international law - or insights gleaned from it - into other courses.