Singh: International Law as a Technical Discipline: Critical Perspectives on the Narrative Structure of a Theory

Sahib Singh (Univ. of Cambridge - Law; Univ. of Vienna - Law) has posted International Law as a Technical Discipline: Critical Perspectives on the Narrative Structure of a Theory. (in Jean d'Aspremont, Formalism and the Sources of International Law, 2013; British Yearbook of International Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

This is an extended review (26 pages) of Jean d'Aspremont's monograph - The Formalism of Sources in International Law. This version appears in the 2013 paperback edition of the book. An amended and extended paper is forthcoming in a leading UK journal.

This paper is primarily constructed to analyse the narrative structure of theories - with a view to commenting on the politics of theory within the academy. In this regard I look at the rhetorical and intellectual manoeuvres used by theories and theorists so that they may appear to posit coherent visions of the world. These include: intellectual specialisation, the appropriation (and politicisation) of Kuhn's paradigmatic structure to theory in order to immunise oneself against critique and the elevation of coherence in thought (over time and different pieces of work) to be highlighted over rupture in a theorists thinking.

In the context of this first purpose, the paper then analyses the turn to formalism within Europe and the fragilities of d'Aspremont's (and generally, Hartian) approach to this turn. Here I look at how this turn is rooted in the rise of the law & economics movement and how formalism is rooted in a pathological desire for (relative) determinacy and methodological empiricism. I spend the largest part of the piece demonstrating how a Hartian approach cannot succeed on its own terms, as well as due to what it methodologically excludes and finally, how d'Aspremont's later work highlights a rupture in method which can only undermine the book's important thesis.