International Law in a World of Liberal States

“The inquiry in this essay thus begins not with classical international law, but with the dominant positive analytical framework shared by both international lawyers and political scientists - Realism. Part I outlines the basic tenets of Realism and introduces the principal alternative to Realism in international relations scholarship — Liberalism. […] The project here, consistent with an overall commitment to a new generation of interdisciplinary scholarship, is to reimagine international law based on an acceptance of this distinction and an extrapolation of its potential implications. Part II distills various factors that political scientists have correlated with the 'liberal peace', factors that can be translated into assumptions about political and economic relations among liberal States. Part III introduces the concept of a world of liberal States, acknowledging the distance between such a world and the present international system but arguing that the hypothesis may nevertheless describe an important dimension of the current system. Part IV constructs a model of international law based on a hypothetical world of liberal States, integrating assumptions about relations among such States with the broader assumptions of Liberal international relations theory.”