Friday, January 22, 2016

d'Aspremont: Martti Koskenniemi, the Mainstream, and Self-Reflectivity

Jean d'Aspremont (Univ. of Manchester - Law; Univ. of Amsterdam - Law) has posted Martti Koskenniemi, the Mainstream, and Self-Reflectivity (Leiden Journal of International Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:
This article argues that contemporary international lawyers all sing the same critical refrain but few have really confronted and integrated the critical attitude deployed in From Apology to Utopia. After the denial and perplexity of the first encounters with Martti Koskenniemi's work, international lawyers came to feel that they had domesticated the perplexity provoked by it. They now all enthuse about the new self-reflectivity that their victorious struggle with From Apology to Utopia supposedly allowed them to acquire. In sum, the contemporary self-proclaimed self-reflective international lawyers, after reading From Apology to Utopia, have returned to business as usual, continuing to let the discipline’s vocabulary decide on their behalf.