High Stakes and Persistent Challenges –: A Rejoinder to Klabbers and Augsberg

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In this separate rejoinder to Jan Klabbers' and Ino Augsberg's comments to the articles in the symposium on New Legal Realism in International Law (Leiden Journal of International Law, Volume 28:2, 2015), we respond from the point of view of the European New Legal Realism (ENLR) as propounded in our initial contribution to the symposium. Agreeing with Ingo Venzke who wrote in his introduction to the symposium that ‘stakes are high’ in the debate over international law and methodology, we argue that both Klabbers and Augsberg, each in their own way, fail to take sufficiently seriously the ENLR challenge to doctrinal scholarship. We argue that Klabbers underestimates the evergreen and persistent character of this challenge when he portrays the current push for New Legal Realism as merely a whimsy fashion wave. And we argue that Augsberg's essentially Kelsenian defence of doctrinal scholarship is insufficiently robust because it inherits the excess epistemological liberalism of its underlying Neo-Kantianism.
Original languageEnglish
JournalLeiden Journal of International Law
Volume28
Issue number3
Pages (from-to)487-493
Number of pages7
ISSN0922-1565
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Sep 2015

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Law - legal realism, Alf Ross, Pierre Bourdieu, Max Weber, European New Legal Realism

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