International Law Politics and Values

This volume derives from a series of lectures delivered as the general course' at the Hague Academy of International law in July 1989. Like those lectures, this volume does not pretend to provide a complete treatise covering all international law. Rather, it offers a particular perspective on the principal subjects of traditional international law, elaborates new developments, and dares reexamine assumptions and premises. The book is built on three themes. The first addresses law as politics, and international law as the law of a political system, now comprised of more than 180 separate, independent states. The essential autonomy of states accounts for the political (as well as economic and cultural) heterogeneity in a pluralist and fragmented system, and international law as its common denominator of normative expression. A second theme explores change in international law as reflecting change in the values and purposes of the international political system. It traces the pursuit through law of the traditional ideal of the state system to secure every state's right to realize its own agenda through its own institutions, and tHenkin, Louis is the author of 'International Law Politics and Values' with ISBN 9780792329084 and ISBN 0792329082.