In the book, From Apology to Utopia, the author shared his views, first, none of

the standard academic treatments captured the simultaneous sense of the rigorous
formalism and substantive or political open-endedness or argument about
international law. Second, there is no good reason why the study of international
law or aspirations of international lawyers should be limited intellectually or
politically. According to Koskenniemi, he was disappointed with how the field of
international was being portrayed as a solid formal structure whose rules,
principles and, institutions had stable relations with each other. With this book,
he strives to fix the meaning of individual rules, principles or, institutions in
some abstract and permanent way, regardless of the changing situations in which
legal interpretations were produced. To understand the structure of international
law is to treat it as a language. Competence in international law is the ability to
connect the rules with other rules at different levels of abstraction and
communication from one person to another. He reiterates that the key to the
professional competence of a lawyer is the ability to take opposite sides in any
international dispute. He also empahized that the politics of international law is
what competent international lawyers do. This competence is the ability to use
grammar in order to generate meaning by doing things in argument. For Koskenniemi,
the grammar takes its starting point from the tension between concreteness and
normality that structures all competent international legal speech. For a
professionally competent argument, it must be rooted in a social concept of law, in
which it claims to emerge from the way international society is. In order to form a
competent argument in international disputes, he asserts that international lawyers
should understand that the grammar of soverignty is constituted by the oscillation
between fact-oriented and law-oriented. It mus reflect some actual authority over
territory.

He also challenges on social pragmatics of the legal profession. He pointed out

that if the focus had been on legislation instead of adjudication, a movement
towards consensus as the governing principle of international law would have
emerged. He pressumes that lawyers comes to a normative problem always from some
prespective, to defend a client, an interest, a theory. Beacuse the field of legal
argument is constructed in an adversarial manner, in which a defense is meaningful
only as a defense againsta formal adversary in court, most international lawyers
share the intuition that the paradigm of their profession lies in arguing in front
of a court, in favor of a client and against an adversary.

In closing thsi remarkable and challenging project, he reminds the readers that to
commit oneself to international law is to allow its grammar to enter as one's
second nature but still to maintain the position of choice. He showed us the
professional and passionate approach to understand the structure of international
legal argumant.