The Quest For World Order And Human Dignity In The Twenty First Century

International law’s archipelago is composed of legal “islands”, which are highly organized, and “offshore” zones, manifesting a much lower degree of legal organization. Each requires a different mode of decisionmaking, each further complicated by the stress of radical change. This General Course is concerned, first, with understanding and assessing the aggregate performance of the world constitutive process, in present and projected constructs; second, with providing the intellectual tools that can enable those involved in making decisions to be more effective, whether they are operating in islands or offshore; and, third, with inquiring into ways the international legal system might be improved. Reisman identifies the individual as the ultimate actor in international law and explores the dilemmas of meaningful individual commitment to a world order of human dignity amidst interlocking communities and overlapping loyalties.

International law is archipelagic. Alongside "islands" of effective international law, you find offshore zones in which law is either undeveloped or manifestly ineffective or in which different norms, different arrangements and even unrestrained "political" factors are operating. Lawyers who work in these zones, whether on behalf of State and non-State actors, require different modes of thinking. They must be able to locate themselves in unstable decision processesby deploying appropriate legal tools and mapping schema; to identify the factors influencing decision, distinguishing the operative from the mythic ones; to project possible decisions and assess the extent they contribute to minimum and optimum order and, if they do not, to invent feasible alternative decisions. Michael Reisman describes the world international law is attached to and sets out a theory about law that enables the international lawyer to identify the common interest in its many zones and to work towards achieving a world public order of human dignity.

This book offers a critique of the principal contemporary approaches to international law alongside its own novel perspectives.

"This book is a case study of my nine-year practice as the first Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). It presents the functioning of the autonomous criminal justice system created by the Rome Statute. The book depicts the Rome Statute operations, its interaction with the War on Terror, and their relationship with national legal systems and the UN Security Council. It comments on regional organizations, including the mechanisms to protect human rights established during the fifties in Europe, after in the Americas, and more recently in Africa"--

This book critically assesses the impact of Richard A. Falk’s scholarship, which has spanned nearly six decades and addressed key issues at the intersections of international law and relations. Falk has offered powerful insights on the nature and reach of international law, international relations, and the structure of their respective processes in order to assess the main challenges to the creation of a just "world order," the path-breaking concept which he has helped to develop. Continuing in the critical spirit that has informed Richard’s work as a scholar and a public intellectual, this book reflects a multiplicity of perspectives and approaches in the analysis and assessment of these selected themes. This volume looks at four key themes of Falk’s work: • International Law and International Relations Theories and Concepts • War, Peace, and Human Security • Social and Political Justice, and • The Scholar as Citizen and Activist This will be a useful book for scholars and students of international law, global governance, political theory, and international relations theory, and for those studying human security, international organizations, and transnational activism.

This book argues that human dignity and law stand in a privileged relationship with one another. Law must be understood as limited by the demands made by human dignity. Conversely, human dignity cannot be properly understood without clarifying its interaction with legal institutions and legal practices. This is not, then, a survey of the uses of human dignity in law; it is a rethinking of human dignity in relation to our principles of social governance. The result is a revisionist account of human dignity and law, one focused less on the use of human dignity in our regulations and more on its constitutive implications for the governance of the public realm. The first part conducts a wide-ranging moral, legal and political analysis of the nature and functions of human dignity. The second part applies that analysis to three fields of legal regulation: international law, transnational law, and domestic public law. The book will appeal to scholars in both philosophy and law. It will also be of interest to political theorists, particularly those working within the liberal tradition or those concerned with institutional design.

In A Transnational Human Rights Approach to Human Trafficking, Yoon Jin Shin proposes an innovative and comprehensive human rights framework to human trafficking, to empower victimized individuals as rights-holders, overcoming the current regime’s state-interest-driven border and crime control approach.