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How Compliance Understates Effectiveness

Part of: The Idea of Effective International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Timothy Meyer
Timothy Meyer*
Affiliation:
University of Georgia School of Law
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Customarily one begins a discussion about the effectiveness of international law by quoting Louis Henkin’s famous remark that “almost all nations obey almost all principles of international law and almost all of their obligations almost all of the time.” For some, this empirical claim supports the notion that international law is a vital tool for furthering international cooperation across a broad range of issue areas. For others, the implicit suggestion that international law’s mere existence might be driving states’ behavior is a calamity of causal inference. Even if Henkin’s claim is empirically correct, effectiveness does not follow from compliance. For a third group, Henkin’s claim may not even be empirically correct. In at least some areas of international law, noncompliance may be relatively high. Deploying the same suspect causal reasoning that the second group worries about, international law skeptics have sometimes suggested that we might infer ineffectiveness on the basis of such noncompliance.

Type
Symposium: The Idea of Effective International Law
Information
AJIL Unbound , Volume 108 , 2014 , pp. 93 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2014

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