Lunch seminar with Brad Roth
Applying a Realistic Interpretivism to International Law
According to Ronald Dworkin, “constructive interpretation is a matter of imposing purpose on an object or practice in order to make of it the best example of the form or genre to which it is taken to belong.” For Dworkin, legal interpretation properly entails a “moral reading” of source material that, “all things considered, makes the community’s legal record the best it can be from the point of view of political morality.”
Dworkin only belatedly came to apply his interpretivist approach to the international legal order, with his major contribution on that subject appearing only after his death. That contribution reflected an incomplete and skewed understanding of the international legal order’s essential purposes, underestimating the enduring prevalence of discord and for that reason overstating the international system’s role in enhancing the legitimacy of municipal governance.
Yet an alternative “moral reading” of the United Nations Charter-based international system, better grounded in the stubborn realities and practical imperatives of global political life, is both available and edifying, promising a more compelling account of the system’s fundamental norms than can be furnished by international legal positivism. This moral reading highlights the international legal order’s role as a framework of accommodation among bearers of differing interests and values, and eschews placing impractical conditions on the compromises needed to achieve interstate peace and cooperation.
Speaker bio
Brad R. Roth is Professor of Political Science and Law at Wayne State University in Detroit , and a Visiting Scholar for Fall 2024 at the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen's University Belfast. His scholarship applies political theory to problems in international and comparative public law, with a special focus on crises of political authority. He is the author of Governmental Illegitimacy in International Law (Oxford University Press, 1999), Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement (Oxford University Press, 2011), and a wide range of book chapters, journal articles, and commentaries dealing with questions of sovereignty, constitutionalism, human rights and democracy. Much of his work focuses on legal aspects of conflicts that have occasioned the use of force (e.g., Israel-Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, and Ukraine) and on retrospective and extraterritorial applications of criminal law to conflict participants.
Brad was a Visiting Scholar at iCourts in the Summer of 2017, and has spoken at two subsequent iCourts conferences.
Brad was a Visiting Scholar at iCourts in the Summer of 2017, and has spoken at two subsequent iCourts conferences.
Join meeting via Zoom.
Meeting ID: 669 5396 2581
Passcode: 381179
