The basic model, its advantages and limitations

Although domestic law analogies are never fully appropriate, this book subjects international law to a framework that is well known in domestic US law, namely Calabresi and Melamed's 1972 distinction between inalienability, property rules and liability rules. Although some scholars have previously referred to this model in discrete fields of international law, this book is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to fully test the model for international law in general. What makes Calabresi and Melamed's model particularly interesting for international law is, first, that it offers a global matrix for legal entitlements, making abstraction of delineations deeply engrained in domestic law such as private versus public law, contract versus tort, civil versus criminal law. As international law does not formally uphold any of these distinctions, such a simplified, global model is more attractive.

Secondly, the Calabresi and Melamed model uses the law and economics criteria of welfare maximization and rational action. As Sykes explained, “[p]ositive economic analysis of international legal regimes conventionally proceeds from an assumption that states behave as if they are rational maximizers over some set of preferences regarding the outcome of their interaction.” Transactions in international relations are thereby regarded as analogous to transactions in private markets, and the insights of economic tools applied to non-market circumstances.