Interpretation in International Law

ISBN-13: 9780198725749 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 432 str.

Andrea Bianchi; Daniel Peat; Matthew Windsor

Opis

The relevance of interpretation to the academic study and professional practice of international law is self-evident. As new insights on the practice and process of interpretation abound in other disciplines, international law and international lawyers have largely remained wedded to a rule-based approach, focusing almost exclusively on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Such an approach neglects interpretation as a distinct and admittedly broader field of theoretical inquiry.

Interpretation in International Law brings together established and emerging international legal scholars to interrogate interpretation as a central concept in international law. The edited collection is creatively structured around the metaphor of the game, which captures and illuminates all the constituent elements of an act of interpretation. The object of the game of interpretation is to persuade one's audience that your own interpretation of the law is the correct one. The rules of play are known and complied with by the players, even though which cards to play is left to the skills and strategies of the individual players. There is also a meta-discourse about the game of interpretation 'playing the game of game-playing' which involves reflection about the nature of the game, its underlying stakes, and who gets to decide by what rules one should play.

Through a series of diverse contributions, Interpretation in International Law reveals interpretation as an inescapable feature of all areas of international law. It will be of interest and utility to all international lawyers whose work touches upon theoretical or practical aspects of interpretation.

Recenzje

Interpretation in International Law is explicitly different from much of the existing literature, and because of its perspective the book manages to add something new to that literature ... Its game analogy is an interesting and creative perspective on interpretation in international law ... [T]he different chapters show it can be employed to extract interesting results from practices that have hitherto primarily been analysed from positivist perspectives.

O autorze

Andrea Bianchi is Professor of International Law and Head of the International Law Department at The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. Previously, he was a Professor at the Catholic University, Milan, Associate Professor at the University of Parma and Professorial Lecturer in International Law at the Bologna Centre of Johns Hopkins University. He has researched and published extensively on various aspects of public international law, with a particular emphasis on theoretical and methodological issues. Daniel Peat is a PhD candidate in Law at the University of Cambridge. He is a member of Gonville & Caius College, and a recipient of the WM Tapp Studentship in Law. He is a graduate of The Graduate Institute, Geneva and the London School of Economics, and has been a visiting researcher/scholar at Harvard Law School, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, and Sciences Po, Paris. He has taught in the Faculty of Law and Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Matthew Windsor is a PhD candidate in Law at the University of Cambridge. He is a member of Gonville & Caius College, and a recipient of the WM Tapp Studentship in Law. He is a graduate of Columbia Law School and the University of Auckland. He has taught in the Faculty of Law and Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. He has previously worked as a litigation associate at the Open Society Justice Initiative in New York City and as a judge's clerk at the Court of Appeal of New Zealand.