New Blog: Invisible College Blog

The Invisible College Blog was launched yesterday. It merges the 1948 blog and The Core. Here's how The Invisible College's founders describe the new blog:

Despite the somewhat similar backgrounds of the contributors -- rather recent University graduates with an interest in things international -- , both blogs [the 1948 blog and The Core] probably differed somewhat in their approaches: The Core focused rather tightly on those areas of international law which directly affect individuals (i.e. human rights law, international humanitarian law and international criminal law) and mostly contained rather "lawyerly" posts, while 1948 took a much broader approach, focusing on international law, politics, economics, and philosophy and featuring somewhat more essayistic posts.

By joining forces, we hope to combine the strengths of both blogs and offer our readers a variety of insights and commentaries on new developments in the international arena. We also hope, however, that this blog can become more than just a site for comments and analyses.

The blog's title refers to a 1977 article by Oscar Schachter ("The Invisible College of International Lawyers", 72 Northwestern University Law Review (1977) 217-226), in which he speaks of the "professional community of international lawyers" forming an "invisible college dedicated to a common intellectual enterprise". While Schachter mostly concerns himself with international lawyers who are government officials and/or career academics, it seems that the "invisible college" he speaks of has grown substantially in the 30 years since then; it now includes undergraduate and graduate students, interns with various international organisations, University researchers, attorneys working in international practice areas, NGO lawyers and many more.

It is our hope that our blog can become not only an interesting read, but an actual community resource for this diverse group. We plan to publish, besides commentaries on international developments, posts on Master and Doctoral programs, summer schools, job opportunities in the field, web resources for scientific research, etc. etc.

We also hope to engage our readers and to enable them to actively contribute to a dialogue on such questions.