International Law by Prof.

Pierre d’Argent
Week 1: Introducing International Law

INTERNATIONAL LAW AROUND US

When one thinks about international law, various images and ideas may pop in your mind: you may
think at war and peace between nations, ongoing humanitarian crisis, or other global issues, like
global warming or the protection of the environment.
You may also think at the protection of basic human rights, from the freedom of speech and of
demonstration to the right to food or the promotion of social rights for workers.
Or more dramatically, you may think at despicable international crimes, in the context of violent
uprisings or acts of terrorism.
You may think at more personal dramatic events that affected your family in recent years, or at more
distant events that made history and allowed for your parents or grand-parents to meet, or events
that forced your family to migrate.
On a more peaceful note, you may just think at your latest long-distance flight, getting a visa at the
embassy of the country you visited, or at the fruits from exotic places you bought yesterday at the
supermarket.
Maybe you're employed or someone in your family is employed by a large transnational corporation
and you've been living abroad because that company made investments there.
Or you have sailors in your family, commercial pilots or engineers working on off-shore oil platforms.
Or just take your smartphone and look at it, and imagine, besides of course the incredible
engineering and technology that made it, imagine the amount of law that was indeed going into it:
not only the fact that you bought it and that you have also contracted with a phone company, which
are largely issue of domestic law, but also the oceans, the phone has travelled after having been
manufactured, the minerals that had to be extracted to make the components and that were
exported, the patents that protect the software in all jurisdictions, the agreements that have been
contracted in order for the data that you download to travel around the planet at the speed of light,
etc.
As much as our daily lives are constantly influenced and shaped by rules of domestic law that go
most of the time unnoticed, they are also increasingly influenced and shaped by rules of
international law.

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At a time of globalization, this does not come as a surprise: the more we interact with each other, the
more we need common rules to sustain that interaction and make it predictable.
Law mediates between us and offers us a common ground for action. And the complexity resulting
from interaction calls for more law.
But what is that law that transcends national settings? How does it come to existence? How can it be
upheld? What can be done when it is not respected? And also: when you look around and see how
much international law is at the same time hypocritically invoked and constantly disregarded by
governments, is it really law?
Is it possible to have international law as law, or are international relations actually governed by
nothing else but power and might? Would international law offer the best illustration of the well-
known thought of Blaise Pascal, who famously wrote that "Unable to make what is just strong, we
made what is strong just"?
And where is justice in this world? Is not justice the purpose of any law?
Those are the kind of questions we are going to try to answer in this course. Or, at least, the course
will help I hope you to have a more informed and articulate view on those fundamental questions
that I just raised and that will be looming large throughout the course despite the fact that, as I
started by recalling, we are actually surrounded by international law all the time.