JSI Seminar: The life of international law is not logic but experience

In-person event

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously maintained that “the life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” Holmes statement suggests an antecedent question: what is the life of the law? This essay construes this question ontologically. What gives law life? What animates it, and in so doing warrants the claim that law contributes to the production of social order in a particular community?

The answer, I contend, is that law lives, or exists, only in those societies where law rules, and law rules only when the exercise of political power is conducted under the supervision of lawyers, agents for whom realizing the rule of law is a calling or vocation. Perhaps surprisingly, I contend that the most prominent proponent of this account of law in the field of international law and legal theory is Martti Koskenniemi. While he generally eschews talk of government in accordance with the rule of law in favor of “a culture of formalism” and “constitutionalism as a mindset,” I demonstrate that Koskenniemi defends the same conception of law that Lon Fuller and Ronald Dworkin do. This conception identifies law not with rules or institutions but with a particular approach to the exercise of political power, one premised on actors reciprocal regard for one another as autonomous and responsible agents.

Read the paper here.

About the speaker:

David Lefkowitz

David Lefkowitz is Professor of Philosophy and the founding Coordinator of the Program in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law (PPEL) at the University of Richmond (US). His scholarship focuses largely on conceptual and normative questions in international law, and the morality of obedience and disobedience to law. He is the author of Philosophy and International Law: A Critical Introduction (CUP 2020), as well as more than forty journal articles and book chapters. Lefkowitz has held research fellowships at Princeton University, the U.S. Naval Academy, and National University of Singapore, and served as a visiting research scholar at Pompeu Fabra University.

Thursday 11 May 2023, 6-7.30pm AEST

Venue: Level 4, Common Room, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1.5

This event is co-hosted by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence and the Sydney Centre for International Law at The University of Sydney Law School.