International Legal Theory is the publication of the International Legal Theory Interest Group of the American Society of International Law.

EDITORS:   Francesco Parisi, George Mason University School of Law
                   Mortimer Sellers, University of Baltimore School of Law
 

Each issue of International Legal Theory contains a lead article on some aspect of international legal theory, and several comments on the lead article.

Submissions of lead articles or comments to International Legal Theory should be sent to:
                   Professor M. N. S. Sellers
                   Center for International and Comparative Law
                   University of Baltimore School of Law
                   1420 North Charles Street
                   Baltimore, Maryland 21201-5779
                  msellers@ubmail.ubalt.edu

If possible, comments should be confined to a maximum of 15 double-spaced pages and should have all references incorporated in the text, without footnotes. Please send a Word Perfect version of the manuscript (or any other ASCII based file.)

The deadlines for submission are March 15 (Spring) and October 15 (Fall) each year.

The lead article for the International Legal Theory 5.1 (Spring, 1999) will be Terry Nardin, "The Rule of Law in International Relations", which follows:

No inquiry into international norms can get very far without an understanding of international law and its place in the international order. But international law is not a single, coherent practice or institution; like other kinds of law, it is a miscellaneous aggregate of rules, principles, ideals, procedures, policies, decisions, commands, recommendations, agreements, customs, precedents, and other normative elements. The international legal system serves a variety of purposes and reflects a diversity of conceptions of international order. For these reasons, the concept of international law is ill-defined and ambiguous. But there is, within the confusion of practices we call "international law," an unambiguous and coherent conception of international order: the idea of the international system as an international society constituted and regulated by a common body of noninstrumental laws. In this conception, states recognize themselves to be fellow members of this international society and fellow subjects of this common international law. Though they may question the desirability of the laws, they acknowledge their authority. And though their relations may alternate between cooperation and conflict, they recognize one another as independent agents. What this means, fundamentally, is that a state is barred from coercively using other states for its own purposes. This mutual respect does not rule out all coercion, but it does limit it-in ways that remain controversial-to preserving the independence of states and upholding the laws that define that independence.

We can, then, identify two distinct modes of international association, one a relationship on the basis of noninstrumental laws governing the transactions of independent, formally equal legal subjects, the other a relationship based on force in which "the powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" (Thucydides). These modes are not particular international orders; they are abstract alternatives realized to some extent in any international order. They reflect the fundamental categories, law and force, in terms of which politics has been theorized for as long as there have been political theorists. The contrast between civility and barbarism, law and force, is a recurring theme in Thucydides' history. Aristotle distinguishes the polis from despotic regimes in similar terms: a polis is as legal association of citizens, despotism a coercive association between master and slaves. But because the rules by which masters coerce slaves are sometimes called "laws," we have somehow to resolve the ambiguity that arises when the word "law" is used in this comprehensive manner. One way in which theorists have attempted to do this is through the idea of the rule of law. When we want to distinguish what I am calling a legal relationship, a relationship of fellow subjects, from a despotic relationship, a relationship in which the strong use the weak, we sometimes speak not of "law," which ambiguously covers both, but "the rule of law."

My aim in this paper is to theorize this idea of "the rule of law" as it applies to international relations. (For the sake of simplicity, I ignore the fact that entities other than states are sometimes considered to be subjects of international law.) Something important is lost, I believe, when we fail to distinguish relations between states as members of an international society, with rights and duties under its common rules, from relations between states as powers deterring, compelling, and in other ways bargaining with one another on the basis of their relative power. Both kinds of relationship exist in any actual international order, but this does not mean that they cannot be distinguished analytically. And it is important that they be distinguished because the place of law is different in each mode. Where the rule of law is the mode of relationship, international law is understood as a constraint on the use of power; where the relationship is one of power, laws are instruments used by those who possess power to control those who do not.

One way of distinguishing these two modes of interpersonal and international relationship is to identify relationship in terms of rules as a moral relationship and to identify the kind of law that governs this relationship with morality. This is the way followed by the tradition of "natural law." Natural law is conventionally understood as an alternative to "legal positivism," which in turn is sometimes understood as holding that law rests on effective enforcement, not morality, and therefore that any effective system of rules, no matter how immoral, must be counted as law. The idea of the rule of law allows us to distinguish law and force as modes of association without relying on this conventional understanding of natural and positive law. To put it differently, the idea of the rule of law makes it possible to distinguish the two modes within legal positivism as well as within natural law. If this is correct, then the debate between natural law and legal positivism, as it is conventionally understood, is misconceived. Law, natural or positive, is a mode of association on the basis of rules of a certain kind, noninstrumental rules constituting and regulating a relationship of "fellow subjects" (Friedman 1998). In the circumstances of international relations, the rule of law identifies an abstract mode of relationship between states in terms of noninstrumental laws, only sometimes or incompletely or ambiguously actualized, and it excludes relations based on of force and, by extension, the use of rules to implement, rather than to constrain, relations based on force. International law as it exists includes rules of the latter sort-instrumental rules-but these parts of international law do not express, and are in fact antithetical to, the rule of law.

To make these conclusions intelligible, never mind plausible, is not an easy task. I will begin by considering how this particular debate is related to other, possibly more familiar, debates about the character and purpose of international law. Next, I will consider how association in terms of law has been understood within the traditions of natural law and legal positivism, and explain the implications of these alternative understandings for international law. Finally, with this as a foundation, I will explain how the rule of law in international relations can be defined and defended in a way that draws upon both traditions. The discussion is intended to clarify a persistent ambiguity in our understanding of international law and international norms generally.
 

Historical Background

Much of the recent literature on international norms that will be familiar to political scientists emerges from the continuing debate over the limits of realism. During the 1970s, critics argued that by focusing on relations between states, realism neglects the equally important realm of "transnational relations." In the 80s they argued that in its preoccupation with power and conflict, realism fails to see how cooperation can be sustained by "international regimes." And in the 90s critics have gone even further to argue that the interests and even the very identities of international actors, interests and identities that realist theorizing takes as given, are themselves a product of relations among these actors. This "social constructivism," as it is called, is bringing the study of international norms back toward several traditions of inquiry outside the main stream of American political science. Without going into detail, let me simply point to the established field of international law, the English school of historical and philosophical inquiry into international society, and the emerging literature of international ethics. All three of these traditions put international norms at the center of their concerns. All are sensitive to the way in which these norms shape the identity of those to whom they apply. And all, it should be noticed, seek an interpretive rather than naturalistic understanding of norms and their place in the international order.

It has been suggested that different fields concerned with the study of international norms are converging on the problem of understanding the conditions of compliance with international norms (Slaughter 1993, 221; Keohane 1997), but this is to frame the question rather narrowly. We might more profitably ask how a decentralized normative order, such as the international legal system or an international regime, can sustain itself in the absence of institutions for making and applying rules. An earlier version of this question led to the emergence, in the seventeenth century, to the modern understanding of international law. Hugo Grotius, for example, is concerned with the question of how there can be law among persons or states confronting one another outside any coercive legal order, civil or divine. Here the problem is conceived not immediately as one of compliance but as an epistemological problem: in the absence of a higher authority to declare the law, how can those who are supposed to be governed by it know what the law requires of them? The premise underlying this question is that there cannot be obligations unless there is someone to prescribe them.

The epistemological question affects both divine and human law. It affects divine law because there are disagreements regarding the proper interpretations of the laws made by God. If religious authorities disagree about the content of divine law and about the proper method of interpreting that law, how can we know what our obligations are under this law? Similar problems arise within human law, both within and between states. Within states, disagreements over the meaning of the laws lead to challenges to legal authority and then to civil war. And between states there is no superior authority to declare the law, with the result that states remain, in relation to one another, in the mode of force, not law.

The idea of natural law is sometimes said to provide a way around these difficulties. Natural law, as understood by Grotius, Pufendorf, and other post-scholastic natural-law theorists, is a system of moral precepts delimiting the rights and obligations of individual and collective persons in their relations with one another. According to these theorists, the epistemological question is solved because natural law can be known apart from its declaration by a superior authority. Its obligations can be discovered through reasoning and therefore independently of revelation, proclamation, or legislation.

What implications does this solution to the epistemological question have for the problem of compliance? Because natural law is binding even if it is not enforced, the natural law tradition assumes that reasonable people don't need to be compelled to act as they know they ought to act. It assumes that once we know what our moral duties are, we will be motivated to fulfill them. Now this solution will not impress political scientists for whom a desire not merely to appear but actually to be just is not among the "causal pathways" along which international norms influence state action. But there is more to the traditional solution than meets the eye. First, although compliance motivated by a desire to behave justly will not be perfect, enforcement or other mechanisms that seek to exploit prudential motives are not perfectly effective in securing compliance, either. Second, compliance is in any case secondary to knowing what precepts we ought to comply with. What concerns the classical natural law moralists-and their modern descendants, who hope for civil and international orders based on "respect for persons," "human rights," "justice," etc.-is compliance not with whatever norms happen to be in place but with norms that are morally defensible. Much of international law as it exists at a given historical moment consists of normative regimes imposed (or, more benignly, "stabilized") by a hegemonic power or powers. Why is it so important that there be compliance with its norms? A regime may facilitate cooperation for undesirable or even unjust ends. If a regime is unjust, perhaps it should be resisted! The real problem of compliance, from a moral point of view, is compliance with norms that are morally justified. The preoccupation with compliance in mainstream American international relations theory may reflect ideological as well as theoretical concerns: neorealism rationalizes American hegemony.

Preoccupation with "the compliance problem" can lead one down a blind alley for another reason. Inquiry focused on this problem often rests on the assumption that to understand compliance is to provide an explanation in terms of underlying causal processes. But the kind of understanding sought by moralists, lawyers, political theorists, historians, and others concerned with the content and meaning of norms must be distinguished from the content-independent explanations sought by social scientists working within naturalist explanatory paradigms. The interpretive and naturalist approaches to inquiry are not different perspectives ("optics") on the same phenomenon but distinct kinds of understanding, each constituting a universe of discourse resting on its own assumptions and postulating its own criteria of reality and truth. These understandings are separated by an unbridgeable logical gap. On one side is the domain of intentionality, on the other the domain of natural causation. In law and ethics we are concerned with intentional phenomena-phenomena involving ideas, beliefs, desires, judgments, choices, actions, practices, and the like-and therefore with the interpretation of meaning. We cannot translate statements about intentional phenomena into statements of nonintentional phenomena without losing something in the translation. Propositions concerning the natural causal processes underlying thinking may explain the biochemistry of thinking but they cannot explain the ideas that are being thought. Such propositions have nothing to say about the content, meaning, significance, or truth of these ideas. Such explanations are categorially irrelevant to understanding human behavior as intelligent choice and action, and therefore irrelevant to the discussion of the moral character of international norms.

Questions about the moral character of international law are not limited to questions that are themselves moral. The effort to distinguish a regime of law from a regime of force may have moral significance, but it can also be understood as a philosophical effort to distinguish alternative conceptions of human conduct, not an effort to judge particular actions within the framework of a body of norms already presumed to be valid. The former answers a theoretical, the latter a practical question. While the two questions are always intertwined and often hard to distinguish, they can be abstracted analytically from discussions of international law and its place in the international order. A good place to begin an inquiry into alternative understandings of law is with the tradition of natural law, because this tradition is particularly concerned with the moral rightness of laws and legal institutions.
 

Natural Law

The idea of natural law begins with Stoicism, a tradition of thought that emerged in Greece after the Macedonian conquest in response to the decay of the polis as a form of political life. As interpreted by Cicero and other Romans (most of the original Greek texts having been lost), Stoic ideas became part of the intellectual inheritance of modern Europe.

Central to Stoicism is the idea of an eternal and immutable law governing all movement and change in the universe (the "cosmos"). This law is both divine and natural, and the order it establishes is a rational order that can, in principle, be understood by human intelligence. Human beings are part of a rationally ordered universe and their conduct is therefore governed by this universal law, "natural law." But because they can choose to obey or disobey natural law, we must think of it as setting a standard for guiding and judging conduct. And because of their shared character as rational beings-beings whose potential, and therefore essence, is to be rational-all human beings are citizens of a single, ideal community: a "cosmopolis" or universal community whose law is this rationally-knowable natural law. The Stoics did not deny that every person is also a citizen or subject of some particular state with rights and duties under the laws of that state. Their point is that human beings have rights and duties as members of the cosmopolis that are distinct from those they enjoy as citizens of a polis, and that they have a law to guide them, even if they are not citizens of any polis.

For the Stoics, the cosmopolis is an ideal model for these lesser, man-made cities, kingdoms, and empires. Such states may be considered "just" in so far as they are true copies of the cosmopolis (the argument here draws on Plato). The idea of the cosmopolis and the law of nature provides a universal criterion by which to determine the justice or injustice of local human laws and institutions. Here, surely, is the source of the modern idea of natural law as the standard for measuring the moral rightness of positive law. In the tradition that springs from these Stoic ideas, morality is not a system of laws or customs, actual or possible, that is practiced by or urged upon some community of human beings. It is a standard according to which all such systems are to be judged and by which every human being should live regardless of the laws and customs of his community.

For the Stoics, this morality is "the true and divine law" that is willed by the gods as well as required by reason. But the idea of divine will is incidental to morality understood as natural law. The Stoics argued that the content of natural law, though divine, can be discovered without directly invoking the will of the gods. Adopting this Stoic principle, Judaism and Christianity came to distinguish between a divine law that is binding on all human beings as rational agents and divine commands addressed to the members of particular communities, for example, to Christians or Jews. A problem in Jewish and Christian ethics is therefore to distinguish the commandments obligating only believers from those obligating all human beings. When Grotius set out in 1603 to answer the question of by what right the Dutch might make war on their rivals in the East Indies, he wanted a universal answer, one based on principles that applied to any state. He therefore did not look to the Christian bible any more than to, say, Dutch law. Scripture does not contain universal law: the law revealed to the Hebrews is law only for them, and Christian doctrine is divine advice about how to lead a more Christian life, not a set of divine commands to be obeyed as law by all human beings. Much of what Jews and Christians assert to be "moral," then, is (on this view) required of those who wish to live a full Jewish or Christian life, not a requirement of morality understood, as it is in the tradition of natural law, as a set of precepts binding on all human beings as rational creatures, precepts that can in principle be known, not because they have been specially revealed, but through the use of reason.

In the later Stoic tradition, "nature" means reason and nothing more. The law of nature applies to human beings because of their nature as rational beings, and not because what some people think it forbids, like contraception, is "against nature" (Donagan 1977, 6). The expression "natural law" is unfortunate because it invites this kind of misunderstanding, and also because the word "nature" obscures the categorical gap, mentioned earlier, between the realm of intelligent thought and action and that of not-intelligent processes, between the intentional world of human action and the extensional world of natural processes (Weinreb 1987). Because morality is part of the former realm, it is confusing to identify it with a name that also evokes the latter. But no name can forestall misunderstanding. Seeking to avoid some of the connotations that have accrued to the words "natural law," some theorists have revived the Stoic expression koinos nomos, which they translate as "common morality." The problem with this expression is that it is easily misinterpreted as identifying moral precepts that are universally observed, although the theorists are concerned only with precepts that can in principle be understood by all human beings and that are binding on all. The failure to distinguish universally acknowledged principles (ius gentium) from universally binding principles (ius naturae) has led to recurrent confusion in ethics (and international ethics) throughout the centuries.

As the preceding sketch of ancient Stoicism suggests, natural law is a system of precepts appropriate for persons whose familiar way of life is crumbling and who are seeking a guide to the good life in these circumstances. The appeal of Stoicism is strongest in situations that reproduce the circumstance of third century Greece-circumstances in which a traditional morality and a traditional politics are put into question. Perhaps the most obvious example of natural law today is the idea of "human rights," rights that belong to every human being regardless of the "polis" to which he or she belongs.

One important strand of natural law thinking runs from Aquinas through the Spanish neo-scholastics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is a strand picked up again in our own time by John Finnis and other theorists of "the new natural law" (Finnis 1980, 1996; Boyle 1992). Another, equally important, strand of natural law thinking can be found in the works of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, Locke, and the eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophers (Haakonssen 1996). In each of these traditions natural law or common morality is more than a set of precepts; it is a system and much effort has gone into analyzing its systematic character. Aquinas, for example, can be understood as systematizing the insights of his predecessors. Grotius, in his unpublished manuscript on the law of prize, derives a system of natural law from a set of primitive assumptions ("rules") and principles ("laws"). This system, parts of which Grotius borrowed from Suarez and other neo-scholastics, defines the school of natural law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two particularly influential versions of this structure are those of Pufendorf, who understood it, and Vattel, who did not. But the most powerful theoretical reconstruction of natural law (apart from Aquinas's) is Kant's.

According to Kant, what unites the precepts of common morality into a coherent system is a single fundamental principle: act always so that you respect every human being, yourself or another, as being a rational creature. In other words: it is impermissible not to so respect every human being. This principle, a variant of "the Golden Rule," yields a system of precepts that are "categorical," that is, independent of contingencies. They are not "hypothetical" precepts like "if you want to be healthy, get some exercise regularly."

The precepts of common morality that are consistent with this fundamental principle can be classified in various ways. We can, for example, distinguish between precepts of duty to oneself and precepts of duty to others. We must also distinguish between principles that guide conduct and those that assign responsibility. The first concern the permissibility of actions: what sorts of things we may or may not do. The second concern the culpability of acts considered subjectively: what sorts of things we can be held responsible for, given our character as agents. We are responsible only for actions done as rational beings, that is, for voluntary acts. And we are responsible not only for what we do but for what we intend to do. Principles of the first kind are invoked to justify an act, principles of the second kind to excuse an agent from blame for an act that is recognized as unjustified.

The natural law tradition attaches particular importance to the distinction between precepts forbidding actions that violate the principle of respect and those requiring us bring about good outcomes, if we can (that is, between absolute or "perfect" and contingent or "imperfect" duties). Moral conduct means choosing, acting, and judging within a constraining framework of principles that are independent of consequential considerations. This does not mean that agents cannot be concerned with consequences, or that there is no obligation to try to bring them about. What it does mean is that bringing about such consequences is not the ultimate criterion of right and wrong in conduct. We can seek to bring about good outcomes for ourselves and others, but only by morally permissible actions. It is this priority of principles forbidding wrong over injunctions to produce good ends that distinguishes natural law as a moral system. Unlike consequentialist theories, which appeal to good outcomes to rationalize the violation of moral prohibitions, natural law must insist on the priority of its prohibitions. Because its fundamental principle categorically forbids violating the respect owed to human beings as rational, natural law must condemn any action or practice that would violate that respect (Donagan 1977, 154). This reasoning is sometimes distilled into a formula like "the end does not justify the means" or "evil is not to be done that good may come." However one puts it, the bottom line is that the prohibitory precepts of common morality are absolute; they may not be violated for the sake of promoting the good of one's own self or of others.

Natural law thinking has many implications for international relations. If what is right and wrong is independent of the moral beliefs and practices of this or that community, for example, then there is a direct challenge to cultural relativism. Acts that violate common morality cannot be justified on the grounds that morality is culturally specific. Natural law thus provides a way of arguing for human rights against the practices of particular communities. Communal autonomy must be respected but it does not justify violating the moral rights of either outsiders or members of the community. Or again, since there is, according to common morality, a positive duty of beneficence, our duties to foreigners are not limited to nonintervention or even to humanitarian intervention when human rights are violated. We are in addition obligated to help in various ways when the inhabitants of foreign countries require it, provided we can do so without ourselves violating basic moral rights. Of course, it is not always clear how one gets from general principles to concrete applications. This is the problem of casuistry (case ethics) and practical reasoning generally-a large topic that I cannot discuss here.

From this discussion of natural law we can see that the word "law" has acquired a number of distinct meanings in the course of its long career. It can mean principles of natural order, like those of Aristotelian teleology or the causal laws of modern physics. It can mean principles of human conduct, rules to be obeyed or disobeyed as a matter of conscious or intelligent choice by human agents. And it can mean rules deliberately enacted within particular human communities: law made and applied by human beings which reflects not universal reason but contingent will. Natural law, then, is no longer a theory of "law" as we have come to understand that word, but of "morality." But the systematic structure of common morality, as theorized in the natural law tradition, can help us distinguish the rule of law from other modes of association identified by the name "law."
 

Legal Positivism

To understand the idea of positive law, it is helpful to consider the contexts within which the expressions "positive law" and "legal positivism" are used. Given my purposes in this paper, an appropriate place to start is with the context provided by the exploration in early modern Europe of how natural law might be actualized both within and between states, for this is the period during which the modern European international system and the modern idea of international law emerged.

The ancient idea of law as a rule decreed ("posited") by a superior, human or divine, acquired new significance in debates about supreme legal authority ("sovereignty") in the emerging territorial states of early modern Europe. The modern view that authentic law, "law properly so called," is positive law springs from the judgment, widely shared in the late sixteenth century, that because religious disagreements were unlikely ever to be decisively resolved, theologically or philosophically, a way had to be found to prevent these disagreements from turning into civil war. And this view, cogently argued by Thomas Hobbes, was that an authoritative and effective sovereign power was required to manage the consequences of religious disagreement. Where there are differences over the interpretation of law, there can only be law where there is an authoritative procedure for choosing among interpretations and making the authoritative interpretation stick. Law means a single agreed system of law, a common law within which persons holding different religious beliefs and believing themselves to be guided by different divine laws might coexist.

At the core of "legal positivism," then, is the view that authentic law is law enacted by a superior but this-worldly authority, a sovereign law-maker. Since reason and revelation each generate a diversity of competing "laws," a choice among them must be made by some one person or assembly (the "sovereign") who is authorized to make this choice. Authentic law results when a sovereign declares a putative obligation to be law. Law, in other words, is created by an authoritative act of will. In time it came to be seen that sovereignty could be a property not only of a person or an assembly but of the larger community from whose will a monarch or legislature derived its authority ("popular sovereignty"), or even of the procedures, no matter how complicated, by which lawmakers were chosen and laws were validated. From the theory that law is the command of the sovereign, legal positivism evolved into the theory that law is particular kind of social practice, one that is distinct from other practices (like morality, religion, etiquette, games, etc.) in which conduct-governing rules are discerned and used. Contemporary legal positivism distinguishes law from morality or custom by the presence of authoritative procedures for recognizing and applying rules, as in H. L. A. Hart's theory of law as a "union of primary and secondary rules" (Hart 1961).

Clearly, defining law as the command of a sovereign creates a problem for international law. Hobbes, for example, concludes that law is possible only within a state and that relations between states are relations of force, not law. For if by law we mean enacted law, international law, which is not in any straightforward sense enacted, fails to meet the criterion. International law is not law but "positive morality" (Austin 1955). One response to such doubts about whether international law is really law is to argue that there is a sense, intelligible if not straightforward, in which international law is enacted. It is enacted by an imaginary collective sovereign which comes into being when the actual sovereigns of the world are in agreement. This is Christian Wolff's theory of the supreme state (civitas maximus), according to which all states taken together must be imagined to hold a kind of sovereignty over each state taken individually (Wolff 1934, Pro: sects. 7-21). Wolff here offers a version of what international lawyers later called the "consent theory," according to which authentic international law is composed of rules to which states have given their consent. Because no sovereign can submit to the commands of another, international law is binding only by consent. Civil law is a sovereign's will expressed internally in legislation, international law this will expressed externally through explicit agreement with other sovereigns (treaties) or by tacit agreement (custom).

Most positivist theory today rejects the view that international law is binding on a state only by its own consent, and rightly so, since one must postulate antecedently-authoritative rules of international law to explain how the consent of states can come to be binding (Nardin 1983, 94-95, 210-20). Applied to international relations, the broader conception of legal positivism (that law is social practice distinct from morality, religion, and other practices) yields the view that international law rests on the customary practice of states and on their agreements with one another. As an autonomous normative system, its rules are determined by examining evidence drawn from practice and not by reasoning directly from the principles of natural law. This conception of international law, which can be found in seventeenth-century works like Samuel Rachel's Dissertation on the Law of Nature and of Nations (1676), had by end of the eighteenth century become the standard view of international lawyers. Because it had its source in concrete state practice, not abstract reason, the law of nations could and should be distinguished from natural law.

There is disagreement, then, within the positivist tradition about whether international law is really law. Some argue that international law is deficient because there is no legislative body to enact laws, no judges to apply them in particular disputes, or no power to compel obedience. Because of these deficiencies, the institutions for authoritatively declaring and applying international rules are so rudimentary as to preclude the possibility of an international legal order. Foreign policy, for these skeptical realists, takes place in a realm of power, not law, and must be guided by prudence, not principle. Other legal positivists are confident that legal order can exist without such institutions. For them, the criterion of law lies in the reasonably consistent, reliable, and impartial application of common rules, not in the particular institutions by which this is accomplished. And they argue that the rules of international society are applied in ways that meet the criterion.

The tradition is agreed, however, in holding that the validity and obligatory character of legal rules is determined according to procedures that are internal to the legal system. Law, properly so called, is a set of rules distinguishable from revealed divine law, from rational morality (natural law), and from the accepted moral beliefs and practices of a given society. The content of particular legal and moral systems may overlap, and some legal systems may explicitly incorporate moral principles, but the authenticity of legal rules as law does not depend on their correspondence to moral principles. Nor does it depend, as utilitarians, realists, and other instrumentalists sometimes argue, on their consequential desirability. As John Austin (1955, 184) put it, "the existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit another."

A recurring objection to legal positivism is that in defining law as a body of rules divorced from morality, it begs the question that a legal theory is supposed to answer, which is how human beings can live justly together. Those who see natural law not only as a source of moral guidance but a source of law argue that positive law that deviates from natural law is not really law: "As Augustine says, 'that which is not just seems to be no law at all.' . . . Consequently, every human law has just so much of the nature of law as it is derived from the law of nature" (Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 95, a. 2). To deal adequately with this objection, legal positivism must distinguish law from the mere exercise of power. What positivism needs, in other words, is not merely a definition of law but a conception of legality that is distinct from effective rule. The idea of the rule of law can be understood as a solution to this problem within positivist legal theory.
 

The Rule of Law

Because the rule of law is itself a contested concept, it cannot without further clarification be used to resolve disputes about the meaning of law. The concept is often presented as a list of criteria for evaluating a legal order: there should be no secret or retrospective laws, no obligations other than those imposed by law, no arbitrary exemptions or private laws, etc. (Fuller 1969, 39; see also Raz 1979, 214-19, and Solum 1994, 121-22). But such a list is of little value, theoretically speaking, unless it rests on a coherent account of the place of law in social order. The rule of law, as an analytical concept, belongs to the effort to distinguish one particular kind of order from the diversity of orders collected under the name "law." In the tradition of political theorizing that is concerned with this project, the rule of law is understood to be a moral practice augmented by institutions for declaring and using its rules. Understood in this way, the rule of law can be seen as reflecting the concerns of both natural law theory and legal positivism.

From the perspective of natural law, the point of having a legal system is to realize the ideal of a moral relationship among human beings in the contingent circumstances of actual communities. Furthermore, if the purpose of law is to get people to behave morally, moral limits must be imposed on the conduct of public officials as well as on that of ordinary citizens. And this means imposing moral limits on ordinary lawmaking as well as on the arbitrary, extralegal use of political power. For the natural law tradition, the rule of law expresses the inherently moral character of authentic law and the superiority of morality to mere positive law.

From the standpoint of legal positivism, however, it seems clear that a legal system can serve the purpose of institutionalizing a moral relationship only if the obligations it imposes are determined by its own internal criteria of authenticity. Law is as an invention designed to remedy the inability of moralities to settle disputes about the interpretation of rules by providing agreed procedures for determining their meaning and thereby distinguishing rules that are valid as law from those that are not. Such procedures make it possible to establish the validity or authenticity of a disputed rule in a given system in the face of disagreements regarding its moral rightness or consequential desirability. Whether a rule is morally justified may remain in dispute, but the moral question has been separated from the question of legal validity. (A legal system can include moral considerations among the criteria used to determine the validity of legal rules, but in that case such considerations have been incorporated into the law and are no longer external. On this point, see Coleman and Leiter (1996, 243) and the literature cited therein.) From the standpoint of legal positivism, then, natural law is deficient as a theory of law because it cannot distinguish the validity of a rule as law from its moral rightness. In transforming a body of moral rules into a system of effective law, the first problem is not securing compliance with the rules but, as Grotius saw, of knowing what the rules are, of establishing authentic law.

In an association governed by the rule of law, laws retain their moral quality as rules regulating the coexistence of individual or collective persons, each pursuing its own self-chosen goals, by prescribing obligations to be observed in that pursuit. Like the categorical precepts of common morality, the laws of a community governed by the rule of law are rules, not commands. And they are noninstrumental rules on the basis of which persons are associated, not instrumental devices for securing the satisfaction of particular, substantive satisfactions. Non-instrumental rules are concerned with the propriety of actions, not their usefulness in achieving particular outcomes. The authority of such rules rests on their validity as law, as determined by the procedures a legal system provides for determining this validity, not on their instrumental value. That is why an association whose government is conceived as an instrument for achieving collective goals by issuing orders cannot be said to be an association based on the rule of law. The rule of law thus provides an alternative, within positivism, to the view that any expression of sovereign will counts as law.

Emphasizing the noninstrumental character of law does not entirely resolve the problem of the relationship between morality and law, however. For where the noninstrumental principles for judging conduct are both moral and legal, it is not clear what justice requires where moral and legal considerations are in tension with one another. Bargaining and cooperation are not forbidden but they are constrained by noninstrumental rules of international coexistence.

Some in the positivist tradition, following Hobbes, have argued that the justice of a law is nothing other than its validity as law. But because it makes law the sole standard of justice, this argument leaves little room for moral criticism: whatever is legally valid is also just. But we need not accept Hobbes's conclusion on this point. We can, along with Hart and other recent positivists, distinguish the justice, the moral rightness, of a law from its validity as law (Hart 1983; Oakeshott, 1983). Doing so makes room for the moral criticism of law. But it also keeps moral criticism separate from legal interpretation. On this view, the justice of a law is unrelated to the procedure by which it was made. A just law, here, is not one that has been properly enacted but one that is proper to have been enacted.

To avoid subverting the rule of law, moral criticism of positive law must draw on principles of justice that are already recognized, at least in part, within the legal system being criticized. If we identify justice with universal moral standards unrelated to the legal culture of a community, as some theories of natural law do, justice becomes an alternative to law. The effect of this identification is to subvert the rule of law because it results in two distinct standards of conduct, positive law and natural justice. A legal order can avoid being forced to choose between law and justice only if it already embodies the moral standards that are used to criticize it. An appropriate standard by which to evaluate the justice of a particular legal rule is therefore one that is already intimated by the system of which that rule is a part. Such a standard, which reflects a concern with the internal coherence of a legal system, rules out, as a practical criterion for determining the justice or injustice of particular laws, that they should conform to universal moral principles. The frequent invocation of such principles as an alternative to law is a sign not of the flourishing of the rule of law but of its decay (Oakeshott 1983, 40-44).

What are the implications of this understanding of the rule of law for international relations? The rule of law, as a mode of association between states, cannot be identified with international law as it exists. That law is a mixture of instrumental commands and agreements, on the one hand, and noninstrumental rules and procedures, on the other. Like any other actual legal order, international law contains instrumental rules intended to facilitate pursuing particular purposes, producing particular outcomes, and conferring benefits on particular beneficiaries. But these instrumental rules are intrusions of interest and power into the rule of law. The rule of law in international relations is concerned with regulating the coexistence of members of the community with one another.

Furthermore, if the rule of law is to be the basis of international relations, the moral considerations used in the criticism of international law must be restricted to those springing from an understanding of the customs and usages of international society. Criticism of international law that reflects a concern for sustaining the rule of law will draw on principles that are sensitive to the kinds of obligations that are appropriately imposed by international law, given its particular character as a system of law. It will avoid the temptation to import into international discourse abstract conceptions of justice that are incompatible with, and likely to subvert, the basic principles of international law.

The idea of the rule of law is a delicate construction designed to avoid the extremes of legal positivism, which makes legality itself the criterion of justice, and natural law, which makes justice into a criterion of legality. Against positivism, it denies that skepticism regarding moral claims must end in the conclusion that justice can have no meaning apart from law. Against natural law, it reminds us that legal order is grounded on recognition of the authority of laws, not on independent judgments of their justice or injustice. Law can supply a community's need for common rules only where it is valid or authentic law, that is, where its authority is established independently of its consequential desirability or moral rightness. The rules of international law should have moral content and they are subject to moral criticism, but their authority as law does not rest on moral criteria (Nardin 1998).

The idea of law is on the defensive within as well as between states. All law has been eroded by skepticism regarding the foundations, religious or rational, of moral knowledge. Modern thought and practice does not leave much room for belief in law as an authoritative constraint on human activity. It sees law as an instrument of human purposes, as a set of tools or techniques for getting things done. This is not law as it was once understood: as a law constraining the pursuit of all human purposes. Skepticism regarding this conception of law goes beyond the man-made laws of the modern state, positive law. It also undermines the idea of morality as a body of higher law, natural law. In the context of the problem of sustaining moral conduct in the absence of secure epistemological foundations, then, international law is in trouble not because of its alleged defects as law but because it has come, like other kinds of law, to be seen as an instrument of human purposes rather than as a constraint on the pursuit of purposes. The idea of the rule of law can be understood, in this context, as a way of restating, in a modern idiom, the proposition that it is authoritative noninstrumental rules of coexistence, not instrumental rules of cooperation on the basis of relative power, that distinguishes a moral international society from a despotic anarchy of unequal powers. Of course, the rule of law may be even further from being realized between states than it is within them. Even so, it remains relevant as a tool for helping us to understand the actual and potential role of norms in the international order.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Bibliography
 

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Boyle, Joseph. "Natural Law and International Ethics." In Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel, eds., Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
 

Coleman, Jules L. and Brian Leiter, "Legal Positivism." In Dennis Patterson, ed., A Companion to Law and Legal Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
 

Donagan, Alan. The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
 

Friedman, Richard. "Some Thoughts on Natural Law and International Order." In David R. Mapel and Terry Nardin, eds., International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
 

Finnis, John. Natural Rights and Natural Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
 

_____. "The Ethics of War and Peace in the Catholic Natural Law Tradition." In Terry Nardin, ed., The Ethics of War and Peace: Religious and Secular Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
 

Fuller, Lon L. The Morality of Law, Revised Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969).
 

Haakonssen, Knud. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
 

Hart, H. L. A. The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).
 

_____. "Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals." In Hart, Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
 

Keohane, Robert O. "International Relations and International Law: Two Optics." International Legal Theory (1997).
 

Nardin, Terry. Law, Morality, and the Relations of States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
 

_____. "Legal Positivism as a Theory of International Society." In David R. Mapel and Terry Nardin, eds., International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
 

Oakeshott, Michael. "The Rule of Law." In Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
 

Raz, Joseph. The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
 

Slaughter, Anne-Marie. "International Law and International Relations Theory: A Dual Agenda." American Journal of International Law, 87 (1993).
 

Solum, Lawrence B. "Equity and the Rule of Law." In Ian Shapiro, ed., The Rule of Law (New York: New York University Press, 1994).
 

Weinreb, Lloyd L. Natural Law and Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
 

Wolff, Christian. The Law of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

JUSTICE AND THE RULE OF LAW IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
 

No inquiry into international law, and its place in the international order, can get very far (or make much sense) without a theory of what law is, and what makes the law worthwhile. Mine is this: that the central element of law in every legal system - what makes law "law" as distinct from other systems of rules or coercion - is law's claim to codify justice. All laws and legal systems claim to realize justice. Rules that do not claim justice cannot claim to be laws (Sellers 1992A). This is not to say that all laws are just, but rather that all legal systems claim to be just, or to realize justice better than other available systems for mediating conflicts and regulating human society.

Applied to international relations this means that international norms always claim to be just, when they seek recognition as "law" to govern the actions of states (or other international persons or behavior). For example, a hegemonic power might seek to impose its own world-view as "law" on other, less-powerful states, but in doing so would also claim to be enforcing "justice", which is to say, enforcing norms that ought to be obeyed, without coercion. Such norms may not be just. But they must claim to be. The frank imposition of unjust norms on subservient populations would not be law, without the claim of justice to support it.
 

The Rule of Law

The rule of law is the system, much praised since antiquity, in which the "imperia legum potentiora est quam hominum" - "the rule of law is greater than the rule of men." The value of this method of government - as advocated by Aristotle, Livy and their successors in Italy, England, France and the United States of America - depends on the assumption that law serves justice, which is to say the common good of all those subject to its regulation (Sellers 2000). If the law serves justice, then the rule of law realizes justice, while rule by the will of individual men or women would serve private interests, against the common good of the community as a whole.

The value and desirability of the rule of law depends entirely upon its efficacy in securing justice. While all law claims to be just, not all laws actually always are. One could easily imagine a legal regime in which laws claiming to be just in fact systematically advanced the unjust ends of a ruling elite or hegemon. This makes the actual success of any legal system's service to justice the only effective measure of its value and binding force on any supposed subjects of its legal control. Unjust legal systems do not deserve deference, although prudence may dictate circumspection in defying their power, so long as they enforce their will (Sellers 1992B).

The rule of law secures predictability, even in unjust regimes, by providing known regulations in advance. When laws rule, and not men, people can plan their actions, based on the law's known provisions, whether these are just or not. Since laws always claim to be just, the identification and application of law may tend to soften the rule of even very unjust regimes. By seeking to present their edicts as "law", and therefore deserving of respect, even despots and oligarchs must claim concern for the general welfare and common good of the people. This may encourage or at least allow some judges and others to apply the law more justly than insincere and self-seeking legislators ever in fact intended.
 

The Natural Law

Let us call the law that actually would be just in a given situation the "natural law." The natural law is the law that all legal systems claim to seek and impose, though few will ever really do so. Some may claim quite simply with Thomas Hobbes that natural law requires no more than to know your superior's will, and to follow it. This claim, like all other assertions that any system of norms be recognized as "law", amounts to an assertion of justice. Thomas Hobbes defined "justice" as whatever your sovereign desires (short of self-immolation) (Sellers, 1998). Few other theorists would be so bold, but anyone who speaks of "law" makes an implicit assumption that the system in question claims to realize the natural justice that all law necessarily claims to serve.

The actual validity (Sellers 1992A) and legitimate authority (Sellers 1992B) of any system of law depend on that system's usefulness in discovering and enforcing the natural law of nay given situation. Supposed standards of international law (for example) deserve deference and obedience only to the extent that they either actually implement the natural law or (and this is the important point) represent a system of legislation more likely to realize the natural law than would unregulated conflicts, in which every individual simply decided for his or herself what the natural law requires to be done.

International law differs from most other law in that its content is relatively unsettled. Most legal systems have widely accepted mechanisms for determining what law requires, when different views conflict. International law has no obvious legislature, judiciary or executive power. This means in many cases that disputes over issues in international law provoke direct appeals to natural law, because the mediating institutions that would settle disputes about the content of natural law are weak, missing or controversial. If international law is "the law of nature applied to nations" (as all law is, or claims to be) then the direct study of nature (i.e. human nature and needs) will be the best method for finding what international law requires, when other methods fail.
 

The Positive Law

Legal systems exist to preclude the necessity of direct appeals to natural law in resolving disputes. Given human self-interest, self-righteousness, and the natural capacity for self-deception, perceptions of the natural law will often (perhaps usually) vary, whenever conflicts arise. Legal systems and the rule of law offer objective methods for determining what the natural law requires, so that one claimant can defer to the other, without trying the relative accuracy of their perceptions with violence or battle (which the weaker or unluckier party will lose, whatever the actual merits of the claim). Legal systems produce "positive law" to clarify the content of natural law when different perceptions of justice collide.

Not all positive law will actually embody the natural law of the case, although positive law will always claim to do so. In fact, positive law may be mistaken, unjust and unfair. If so the legal system has failed, on its own terms, because all legal systems claim to find justice. The natural measure of any legal system's value, validity and worthiness to be obeyed is its efficacy in doing what it claims to do - realizing the justice of the case. If a legal system finds and enforces the just result better than would have happened in the absence of that legal regime, then its rule deserves deference, until a better system can be found to take its place.

The binding force and public interest of the "positive law" of international relations depends entirely upon its ability to implement a just world order to resolve international conflicts and controversies. Different proposed sources of law should be evaluated according to their usefulness in finding and maintaining a just would order, or as just a world as will be possible, given the circumstances. This requires taking into account the world order that already prevails, to the extent that one does. If, for example, widely recognized positive law already exists in the form of "international custom" or treaties, then this "law," and the system that supports it as "law" must endorse it as "just". Whether such international "law" deserves deference will depend on whether this claim to establish justice is actually true (or not).
 

Conclusion

International law, like all law, claims to codify justice. Codifying justice is desirable because it precludes or settles conflicts, and prevents the imposition of unjust desires by one state or person on another. The rule of law keeps those with power honest, by guiding their activities to serve the common good, not their own private interests or desires. This only works so long as good law rules. Not all laws serve justice as well as they claim to. The greater this gap between "natural" and "positive" law, the less the validity or legitimacy of the legal system in question, and the less it deserves to be obeyed.

International "law" is unusually vague in prescribing its positive laws. Debates about the content of international law often reduce to conflicts about natural law, or different possible conflicting sources of positive law, which may yield different results. Real benefits will follow when states establish a just system of positive law to resolve their international conflicts. No such system fully governs every conflict (yet). Until it does states and scholars should seek to encourage the development of just institutions of international adjudication (Sellers 1996), without relinquishing their direct commitment to natural law and justice. Those charged with interpreting international law should remember that all law claims to be "just" and frame their decisions accordingly, to secure the eventual rule of law in international relations.

1. ¹Written for the Conference on International Norms, The Leonard Davis Institute of International Relations, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, May 26-27, 1997. All rights reserved.