Skeptical Internationalism

Fordham Law Review
Volume 78 Issue 5 Article 11
2010
Skeptical Internationalism: A Study of Whether International Law

Is Law
Joshua Kleinfeld
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Recommended Citation
Joshua Kleinfeld, Skeptical Internationalism: A Study of Whether International Law Is Law, 78 Fordham L.
Rev. 2451 (2010).
Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol78/iss5/11
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Skeptical Internationalism: A Study of Whether International Law Is Law
Cover Page Footnote

Research Fellow, Normative Orders Cluster of Excellence, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. I would
like to acknowledge the four judges who have done the most to show me the law as it is—the three for
whom I’ve worked, Aharon Barak, Janice Rogers Brown, and J. Harvie Wilkinson III, and my father, Andrew
J. Kleinfeld.
This article is available in Fordham Law Review: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol78/iss5/11

ARTICLE
SKEPTICAL INTERNATIONALISM:
A STUDY OF WHETHER
INTERNATIONAL LAW IS LAW
Joshua Kleinfeld*
Should internationallaw be understood as a form of law at all? The
premise here is that if we are to get some purchase on that question, we
should consult the experience of internationallaw in operation. The analysis
proceeds in two steps. First, the Article takes up the litigation connected to
the Israeli/West Bank barrier,asking whether that case was or could have
been addressed in such a way as to keep faith with minimal principles of
legality. It wasn't, the Article finds, but it could have been. Second, the
Article specifiesfour values that are constitutive elements of the experience of
law as law: that law have the capacity to give rise to events in the world
(law's efficacy); that it obligate as a matter of legitimate authority (law's
normativity); that it obligate as a matter of moral rationality (normativity
again); and that it maintain a characterdistinctfrom the political orpartisan
(law's objectivity). Internationallaw as seen in the Barrier case is then put
to the test with respect to each of the four-and again the outcome is that
nothing intrinsicto internationallaw deprived it of the characterof law, but
that the courts and other institutions of the internationalsystem fell short of
the law's promise. These conclusions suggest a position this Article terms
"skeptical internationalism"--a position that affirms international law's
project and doctrinal content, but is rebuttably skeptical of the courts and
other institutions charged with interpreting that content and carrying that
project out. The jurisprudentialimplicationsof such a view are explored.
* Research Fellow, Normative Orders Cluster of Excellence, Goethe University Frankfurt

am Main. I would like to acknowledge the four judges who have done the most to show me
the law as it is-the three for whom I've worked, Aharon Barak, Janice Rogers Brown, and
J. Harvie Wilkinson III, and my father, Andrew J. Kleinfeld.
2451
2452 FORDHAMLA WREVIEW [Vol. 78
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: THE QUESTION AND THE CASE .................................... 2452
I. PRINCIPLES OF LEGALITY AND THE BARRIER BETWEEN ISRAEL AND
THE W EST B ANK ......................................................................... 2461
A. The InternationalCourt of Justice in the BarrierCase ......... 2461
1. Principles of Legality and Finding Facts .......................... 2464
2. Principles of Legality and Applying Law ......................... 2472
B. The IsraeliHigh Court of Justice in the BarrierCase ........... 2483
1. Principles of Legality and Finding Facts ....................... 2484
2. Principles of Legality and Applying Law ........................ 2486
C. The Possibilityof Law in the BarrierCase ............................ 2492
1. The Opening Position ...................................................... 2492
2. A nnexation ....................................................................... 2494
3. Hum anitarian Rights ........................................................ 2498
II. INTERNATIONAL LAW AND LAW'S SELF-CONSTITUTING VALUES ... 2501
A . Efficacy ................................................................................... 2504
B . Obligation............................................................................... 2510
1. Law 's Legitim ate Authority ............................................. 2513
2. Law 's Moral Rationality .................................................. 2520
C . Objectivity............................................................................... 2522
CONCLUSION: SKEPTICAL INTERNATIONALISM ..................................... 2527
INTRODUCTION: THE QUESTION AND THE CASE

There is an intuition that international law is not actually law at all, that
though it goes by the name of "law" it is in fact closer to politics, or moral
exhortation, or aspiration, or pretense. The intuition is so magnetic that
generations of jurisprudentialists, international lawyers, political
philosophers, and political officials have felt its tug; it passes through them
from Bentham and Austin to Kelsen and Hart,1 from Oppenheim to
1. JOHN AUSTIN, THE PROVINCE OF JURISPRUDENCE DETERMINED 30-31, 117, 122-24,

171 (Wilfrid E. Rumble ed., Cambridge Univ. Press 1995) (1832) ("Laws properly so called
are a species of commands" issued by a "sovereign" to a "subject" and backed by "the power
of affecting others with evil or pain," while international law is only a species of "positive
morality" set by the "opinions or sentiments current among nations."); JEREMY BENTHAM, OF
LAWS INGENERAL 16, 70 (H.L.A. Hart ed., Athlone Press 1970) (1782) ("[A] treaty made by
one sovereign with another is not itself a law," though it has "an intimate connection" with
the law, and may bind to some degree through "the force of the moral and religious
sanctions."); H.L.A. HART, THE CONCEPT Or LAW 237 (2d ed. 1994) (grappling with what
international is, and concluding finally that it is at least "'sufficiently analogous' to
municipal law" to "make the lawyers' technique freely transferable from the one to the
other" (citation omitted)); HANS KELSEN, LAW AND PEACE IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 1,
52, 54-55 (1942) (arguing that it is "possible to interpret" international law as law, if only
"primitive law," and that we should "choose this interpretation" in order "to make of
international law a workable order for the promotion of peace"). What matters to me is not
2010] SKEPTICAL INTERNATIONALISM 2453
Goldsmith and Posner, 2 and from Hobbes to Acheson, Kennan, and Dulles, 3
among many others. The intuition takes voice in different ways, of course,
as it wends through so many and such diverse theoretical conceptions of
what law is and how international life works. But prior to all the theory is a
certain original impulse of the mind in a particular direction. That original
impulse is what I mean by "intuition." Before the theorizing begins, and
after it subsides, the intuition persists.
Naturally an intuition so powerful has spurred a great debate on the status
of international law (more properly, public international law, but I will drop
that qualifier from here on). Three distinct types of arguments recur in the
debate-albeit in various formulations and often entwined. First is the
argument from deduction: "All law is thus-and-so; therefore international
law is (or is not) a part of it," or "International law is such-and-such;
therefore all law is (or is not) such-and-such too." 4 The problem with these
arguments is that they require us to commit at the outset to some totalizing
jurisprudential theory, from which an answer to the question of
international law is supposed to follow just as a matter of a priori
deduction. I doubt I'm alone in finding it all but impossible to come to my
convictions about large social matters on that sort of basis. Second is the
so much the positions these or other theorists and officials staked out as the fact that they felt
it necessary to engage the issue, that international law presented itself to them as a sort of
problem.
2. JACK L. GOLDSMITH & ERIC A. POSNER, THE LIMITS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 201-02
(2005) (asking whether international law is "not law but politics" or "not law but morality"
and concluding that "[i]t is politics, but a special kind of politics"); 1 LASSA OPPENHEIM,
INTERNATIONAL LAW 12 (Ronald F. Roxburgh ed., 3d ed. 1920) ("The fact is that theorists
only are divided concerning the character of the Law of Nations as real law. In practice
International Law is constantly recognised as law.").
3. See ANTHONY CLARK AREND, PURSUING A JUST AND DURABLE PEACE: JOHN FOSTER
DULLES AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION 57 (1988) ("I confess to being one of those
lawyers who do not regard 'international law as law at all'...." (emphasis omitted)
(quoting Letter from John Foster Dulles to Henry Luce 1-2 (Sept. 29, 1943) (on file with the
Fordham Law Review)); PHILIP BOBBITT, THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES 653 (2002) ("Acheson
accurately (I believe) represented the attitudes of many diplomats and officials that
international law is little more than a pretentious irrelevance."); THOMAS HOBBES,
LEVIATHAN 90 (Richard Tuck ed., Cambridge 1996) (1651) ("[I]n all times, Kings, and
Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in... a posture of
War .... Where there is no common Power, there is no Law ... "); GEORGE F. KENNAN,
AMERICAN DIPLOMACY, 1900-1950, at 95 (1951) (challenging the theoretical and practical
"deficiencies" of believing "that it should be possible to suppress the chaotic and dangerous
aspirations of governments in the international field by the acceptance of some system of
legal rules and restraints").
4. Compare AUSTIN, supra note 1, at 30-31, 122-24 (defining law as the "commands"
of a "sovereign"-and thus excluding international law from the category), with W. Michael
Reisman, InternationalLawmaking: A Process of Communication, 75 AM. Soc'Y INT'L L.
PROC. 101, 107, 113 (1981) (defining international lawmaking as "any communication
between elites and politically relevant groups which shapes wide expectations about
appropriate future behavior"-and arguing that all lawmaking should be understood
accordingly). The current debate concerning the legal status of customary international law
also has a flavor of the deductive approach, insofar as it centers on whether customary
international law is grounded in the sort of authority that makes for law in U.S. federal
courts. See infra Part II.B. 1.
2454 FORDHAMLA W REVIEW [Vol. 78
argument from ideology: "International law promises to advance such

important social goods," we are told, "that it just must be law," or the
inverse, "International law threatens such dangerous consequences that it
must not be law." 5 The problem here is that to accept any such argument,
one must join one of the ideological sides-and join so thoroughly that one
is prepared to treat the very word "law" as a political instrument, an
honorific to bestow whenever doing so would give the ball a kick down the
field in the next big game. Third is the argument from impatience: "We
should just get over this debate about international law," we are told. "The
question is immature and we should grow out of it," or "The question is
malformed and we should transcend it."'6 But the intuition is too strong to
set aside-and anyway, a strong intuition, like a perception, is not the kind
of thing we can get over just because we are told we should.
Why not a case study? Why not come to grips with the intuition
inductively and in a context? What the debate about international law's
character as law most conspicuously lacks is specificity. Always the mode
of address is abstract, sweeping; international law (or some large chunk of
it, like customary international law) comes in for judgment as a body and is
measured as a body against some general account of what law is or what it
is for. But the grist of persuasion in social matters is experience coupled
with the kind of theory that helps illuminate experience, not theoretical or
political claims of an abstract and categorical sort, and it is not very
lawyerly, of us to debate this issue with so little regard for the beautiful
particularities of cases. The insights a case study yields are of uncertain
general force; that is a disadvantage. One must attach provisos: on the
strength of this case, the intuition is warranted or unwarranted in these
respects. But the strength of a case study is the possibility of nuance and
5. Compare Harold Hongju Koh, Is There a "New" New Haven School of International
Law?, 32 YALE J. INT'L L. 559, 563, 572 (2007) (embracing the New Haven School's
"policy-oriented jurisprudence" in which international law takes the shape necessary to
promote "'a public order of human dignity"' (quoting W. Michael Reisman, Theory About
Law: Jurisprudencefor a Free Society, 108 YALE L.J. 935, 939 (1999))), with Jeremy
Rabkin, American Self-Defense Shouldn't Be Too Distracted by International Law, 30
HARV. J.L. & PUB.POL'Y 31, 31 (2006) (defending U.S. policies following September 11 th
on the grounds that "[i]nternational law in these areas is 'law' by courtesy or aspiration more
than it is a reliable guide to actual international conduct").
6. See, e.g., THOMAS M. FRANCK, FAIRNESS ININTERNATIONAL LAW AND INSTITUTIONS
6 (1995) [hereinafter FRANCK, FAIRNESS] ("The questions to which the international lawyer
must now be prepared to respond, in this post-ontological era, are different from the
traditional inquiry: whether international law is law. Instead, we are now asked: Is
international law effective? Is it enforceable? Is it understood? And the most important
question: Is international law fair?"). Note, however, that with respect to the use of force,
Franck himself has written a pained acknowledgement of "the inability of any rule ... to
have much control over the behavior of states" and of international law as "always
something of a cultural myth." Thomas M. Franck, Who Killed Article 2(4)? Or: Changing
Norms Governing the Use of Force by States, 64 AM. J. INT'L L. 809, 836 (1970). It is a
view he has recently affirmed. See Thomas M. Franck, What Happens Now? The United
Nations After Iraq, 97 AM. J. INT'L L. 607, 607 (2003) [hereinafter Franck, What Happens
Now?]. I take it, then, that Franck is torn, which is interesting, coming from a voice of such
importance.
surprise, and the opportunity to build reflections of a general nature up from

a base in facts and events. What one needs is a fruitful case. In my view, a
very fruitful case, an extraordinary case, is that of the Israeli Barrier in the
West Bank.
Some eight years ago, during the height of the Second Intifada, Israel's
government began to build a long "fence" or "wall" (which I'll call the
"Barrier") within the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, thus separating
the West Bank from Israel but also placing portions of the West Bank on
the Israeli side of the line. 7 Palestinian villages in the West Bank sued
Israel in the Israeli High Court of Justice (a designation for Israel's
Supreme Court) to have the construction enjoined. At the same time,
Palestinian representatives and allies argued their cause before the United
Nations' chief judicial organ, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), acting
in its advisory capacity. The two cases involved essentially the same
arguments and the same body of public international law. Palestinians
claimed that building the Barrier past the Green Line (the armistice line
establishing Israel's borders after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War) constituted an
illegal annexation of Palestinian land. 8 Additionally, Palestinians claimed
that the Barrier infringed various rights enshrined in international
humanitarian and human rights law. 9 Israel claimed that the Barrier was a
10
security measure and a legal, defensive response to Palestinian terrorism.
7. The situation is so drenched in controversy that the very words used to describe it
get caught up in the clash, and even my simple statement of the issue could be challenged.
See Greg Myre, In the Middle East, Even Words Go to War, N.Y. TIMES, Aug. 3, 2003, § 4,
at 3 (explaining that the Barrier is a "fence" for Israel and a "wall" for Palestinians, that the
West Bank and Gaza Strip are "disputed territories" for Israel and "occupied territories" for
Palestinians, and that Sharon stirred controversy among Israelis when he used the term
"occupation" while Abbas stirred controversy among Palestinians when he used the term
"terrorism"); see also THUCYDIDES, THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR § 3.82 (Richard Crawley
trans., 1874), reprinted in THE LANDMARK THUCYDIDES (Robert B. Strassler ed., The Free
Press 1996) ("So bloody was the march of the revolution .... [that] [w]ords had to change
their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them."). My aim in this
Article with respect to language is neutrality, and failing that, fairness-though no doubt at
times there will be reason for objection. I do think the term "Barrier" is neutral. Neither
side favors it; it captures the structure's function-to bar; and it acknowledges that the
structure at some places looks like a concrete wall, at others looks like a fence, and often
most resembles an obstacle course, complete with trenches and electronic signals.
8. See Written Statement Submitted by Palestine, Legal Consequences of the
Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory 235-68 (Jan. 30, 2004)
[hereinafter Palestinian Statement to ICJ], available at http://www.icj-cij.org/
docket/files/131/1555.pd?PHPSESSID=ad0952bldObd2fd2Oe33586c37d6fcfa. Here, and at
moments throughout this Article, some general background on the Middle East conflict
might come in handy. A good place to start is with the collection of primary source
documents in THE ISRAEL-ARAB READER: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE EAST
CONFLICT (Walter Laqueur & Barry Rubin eds., Penguin Books 7th rev. ed. 2008).
9. See Palestinian Statement to ICJ, supra note 8, at 194-234.
10. See Letter from the Deputy Director General and Legal Advisor of the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, Together with the Written Statement of the Government of Israel, Legal
Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, at i-ii
(Jan. 29, 2004) [hereinafter Israeli Statement to ICJ], available at http://www.icj-
cij.org/docket/files/l 31/1579.pdfPHPSESSID=cb6f3883704b0567d5ecd3a4c 1Off67d.
2456 FORDHAMLAW REVIEW [Vol. 78
The two courts published their decisions a few days apart in the summer
of 2004. In Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the
Occupied Palestinian Territory (Legal Consequences),1 the ICJ held
fourteen to one that Israel had annexed Palestinian land by building the
Barrier past the Green Line; that the Barrier violated an array of Palestinian
human and humanitarian rights; and that Israel's security claims were
meritless or inapplicable-all of which would have been a great victory for
the Palestinians but for the nonbinding character of ICJ advisory opinions.123
1
In Beit Sourik Village Council v. The Government of Israel (Beit Sourik),
the Israeli High Court held that the Barrier -could legally be built past the
Green Line because its purpose was to protect Israeli security rather than to
annex, Palestinian territory, but that the particular route the Barrier took
burdened Palestinians to an unjustified degree, violating the principle of
proportionality. 14 The court ordered the Israeli military to reroute the
Barrier such that, though it might run through the West Bank, it would not
fall so heavily on Palestinians' way of life. 15 This was only a partial
Palestinian victory, but one with force: Israel's government responded to
the ICJ with a denunciation and to its own court by uprooting and rerouting
16
the Barrier.
I was a summer law clerk working for Aharon Barak, Israel's former
chief justice (formally "President of the Supreme Court of Israel"), when he
wrote the Barrier opinion, and I was there in his chambers a week later
when the ICJ published its opposing opinion. I've been cogitating on the
case ever since, turning it over and over in my mind, not knowing at first
what it represented that it should have such a grip on me. It took quite
some time to see the reason. But what gradually became clear is that the
Barrier case is perched just so as to push furiously against the intuition
about whether international law is truly law. Part of the reason is easily
stated: the case involves two peoples locked in the kind of conflict in
which survival as a political community is on the line, and naturally we
wonder whether it is possible or even desirable for such a conflict to be
governed by law. The other part of the reason is not so easily stated; it has
to do with what Israel stands for in the international sphere, and to see it
clearly we need to take a step back. The last century has featured an
11. Advisory Opinion, 2004 I.C.J. 136 (July 9).

12. See infra Part I.A.2.
13. HCJ 2056/04 [2004] IsrSC 58(5) 807, translatedin 43 I.L.M. 1099 (2004).
14. See infra Part I.B.2.
15. See infra Part I.B.2.
16. See Press Release, Isr. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (July 11, 2004),
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Govenmnent/Communiques/2004/Cabinet%20Communique%2
011 -July-2004; Press Release, Isr. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ICJ Advisory Opinion on
Israel's Security Fence-Israeli Statement (July 9, 2004), http://www.mfa.gov.il/
MFA/About+the+Ministry/MFA+Spokesman/2004/Statement+on+ICJ+Advisory+Opinion+
9-July-2004.htm; Press Release, Isr. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Unofficial Summary of
State of Israel's Response Regarding the Security Fence (Feb. 28, 2005),
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Law/Legal+Issues+and+Rulings/Summary%20of
%20Israels%20Response%20regarding%20the%20Security%20Fence%2028-Feb-2005.
extraordinary outpouring of passionate violence. The violence has centered

on race and ethnicity, political ideology, and now religious ideology.
Thucydides claimed that the elemental forces that move states in their
relations toward one another are fear, interest, and honor; 17 that great thesis
has become part of the lore of international relations-and perhaps it once
was so; perhaps it once described the world. But it does not describe our
world. The forces that move nations in contemporary international life are
identity, ideology, and passion. Israel, blazing with these forces, is the
flashpoint and symbol of the age. That is why such a tiny country so rivets
the attention of the contemporary world. And it is why Israel poses such a
challenge for contemporary international law. Can the law govern such
forces? Can it even withstand these forces, or will it get caught up in them,
an instrument of political contention under a spurious legal surface? The
Israeli Barrier is a good case study because it lies exactly at the point of our
greatest hopes and greatest fears for an international condition that aspires
to be an international legal order.
Thus the question in this Article is whether international law was law
properly so called in the Barrier case. Part I focuses on the case, with a
section on the ICJ's opinion, another on the Israeli High Court's opinion,
and a third with my own analysis of the issues. Part I is thus doctrinal, but
though doctrinal, it is also theoretical, asking at all points (by means of the
doctrine, through the doctrine) whether the Barrier case was or could have
been addressed in such a way as to keep faith with minimal principles of
legality. Part II shifts the focus to the international legal system as a whole,
asking whether that system has or could have the character of law, and
calling in the Barrier case as a body of experience and evidence with which
to get some purchase on that larger question. It is an inescapably theoretical
question; to ask it is to ask after the nature of law itself, and there is no
answering without setting forth, at least implicitly, some sort of position as
to what law is-an uncomfortable and formidable prospect. The approach
here is to revert to the skeptical intuition with which this Article began-the
intuition that international law is not really law at all-probing that intuition
so as to make the standards on which it is based explicit, and then building
from those (now explicit) standards a theoretical framework against which
the international legal system can be measured. There are, I will argue, four
such standards, four grounds for doubting international law's character as
law, and they make up the four sub-sections of Part II: doubts about
international law's capacity to give rise to events in the world (law's
efficacy); doubts about international law's capacity to obligate on grounds
of legitimate authority (law's normativity); doubts about international law's
capacity to obligate on grounds of moral rationality (law's normativity
again); and doubts about international law's capacity to maintain a character
distinct from politics (law's objectivity). The notion behind Part II is to ask
whether these four components of the skeptical intuition about international
17. THUCYDIDES, supra note 7, § 1.76.

2458 FORDHAM LAW REVIEW [Vol. 78
law are borne out in-practice. And as there is a certain theoretical approach
at work here, in Parts I and II both, I'd like now to state three premises
concerning that approach.
First, the theoretical tradition of which this Article is a part is not a priori
but what philosophers call reconstructive.18 The central idea is that the best
way to understand the nature of law is to go to our experience of law.
Certain beliefs and values are immanent in that experience-in the social
practices and institutions that make up that experience-and one important
task of social theory is to bring those beliefs and values to light, to
reconstruct them.. In the case at hand, where the question is whether an
enterprise that purports to be law really is law, what we are after is the law's
selfconstituting values-the values in virtue of which an activity is a legal
activity. 19 And here I believe the skeptical intuition about international law
has something important to teach us, for the intuition is like a channel into
which our implicit beliefs and values about law as law are poured. The
intuition, after all, is fundamentally about what law is-it consists in a
skepticism about whether international law is law-and as the intuition is
powerful and enduring and widely shared, and as it seems to be grounded in
our experience of law in everyday life and our professional formation as
lawyers, we may by understanding its component parts be able to get some
purchase on what in practice we already take the law to be. Thus to probe
the intuition is to bring our sense of law as law to self-consciousness. And
once we have done that, we can begin to engage the skepticism toward
international law more critically, accepting the intuition's implicit standards
as to what law is but asking whether (and to what extent and in what ways)
those standards are in fact unmet when one actually observes the
international legal system in operation.
18. The root of this tradition-which is discussed at more length in the opening to Part II
below-is an interpretation of the Hegelian contribution to social thought. See G.W.F.
HEGEL, ELEMENTS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT (Allen W. Wood ed., H.B. Nisbet trans.,
Cambridge Univ. Press 1991) (1820); G.W.F. HEGEL, PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT (A.V.
Miller trans., Oxford Univ. Press 1977) (1807). Other touchstones (for me at least) are the
phenomenological tradition in philosophy, Bernard Williams's example in moral thought,
and Justice Cardozo's reflections, on the nature of adjudication. See BENJAMIN N. CARDOZO,
THE NATURE OF THE JUDICIAL PROCESS 10 (1921) ("What is it that I do when I decide a
case?"); Bernard Williams, Replies, in WORLD, MIND, AND ETHICS:. ESSAYS ON THE ETHICAL
PHILOSOPHY OF BERNARD WILLIAMS 185, 217 (J.E.J. Altham & Ross Harrison eds., 1995)
(discussing how the particularities of "psychological and social reality" can "remind one of
the unreality and, worse, distorting quality" of a form of moral theory that "is frivolous, in
not allowing for anyone's experience, including the author's own"); see also M. MERLEAU-
PONTY, PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION, at vii (Colin Smith trans., Routledge & Kegan
Paul 1986) (1945) ("Phenomenology is .... a philosophy for which the world is always
'already there' before reflection begins .... [It] offers an account of space, time and the
world as we 'live' them. It tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is .... ").
The common theme is that lived experience has the privileged place and conceptual
reflection radiates out from that center.
19. See CHRISTINE M. KORSGAARD, SELF-CONSTITUTION: AGENCY, IDENTITY, AND
INTEGRITY 32 (2009) ("[E]very object and activity is defined by certain standards that are
both constitutive of it and normative for it. These standards are ones that the object or
activity must at least try to meet, insofar as it is to be that object or activity at all.").
20101 SKEPTICAL INTERNATIONALISM 2459
Second, the analysis of the Barrier case in Part I has got to be detailed,
doctrinally exacting, because anything less will make it difficult to get a
good read on either what the skeptical intuition amounts to (what implicit
standards about law as law it implies) or whether it is warranted (when
those standards are applied to international law). When a case first comes
in the door, in my experience, it typically feels at the outset like a messy
jumble of facts and arguments and points of law--call this stage one.
Gradually the case sorts itself into a handful of distinct, comprehensible
positions concerning a handful of distinct, well-formed legal issues-stage
two. Decision cannot rightly come at this point, although much too often it
does; this midpoint of analysis gives off, because it is shallow, a mirage of
discretion, the appearance of a need for open-ended choice when in fact the
law at this point has not yet had a chance to uncover its objectivity. To the
extent the law has the capacity to render determinate answers to legal
questions, stage two is too soon to find them. It is only in a third stage,
when doctrine and argument are sifted, investigated, worked over the
surface of the facts and then sifted and investigated again, that often enough
it becomes clear that only one of the available positions is right or best.
That move from stage two to stage three is what it means for a judge to shift
from expressing a preference (what Richard Posner has called a "voting
model" of judicial decision 20 ) to arriving at a conclusion. The Barrier case
in this Article must serve as the grist of the analysis of whether international
law is law properly so called. It cannot perform that function until we take
it to stage three. And this same insistence on detail, necessary to getting the
legal issues right, is also necessary from the standpoint of reconstructive
social theory-for a case study in reconstructive social theory is not merely
an example but the form in which theoretical knowledge comes (since that
knowledge is thought to be embedded in facts and events). Thus as a matter
of law and philosophy both, stick figures here just won't do.
Third, it is of the utmost importance that we make a distinction between
international courts and international law itself. If there is some
shortcoming in the international legal system, that shortcoming might be
located in either the law-the actual stuff of it, doctrine and sources and all
the rest-or in the courts that fail to recognize and act on what international
law requires. The distinction, I am well aware, runs against the grain, and
has run against the grain ever since Holmes defined law as "prophecies of
what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious." 2 1 There's
something in that definition, a sort of realist swagger, which cannot fail to
impress and intimidate. But taken literally, it cannot be true-or one could
never say (as we say all the time), "The court here got the law wrong."
America's law schools are filled with professors who preach fervently some
species of the doctrine of legal realism; many of them took up prestigious
20. Richard A. Posner, The Supreme Court, 2004 Term-Foreword: A PoliticalCourt,

119 HARV. L. REV.31, 74 (2005).
21. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law, 10 HARV. L. REv. 457, 461
(1897).
clerkships when they finished law school, and one wonders what they saw
in their year or two away that made them so insistent on the matter when
they returned. Was it the law that was inconclusive, and thus made itself
subject to judges' will, or was it the judges who were willful? Did the
realist event-the realist moment, as it were--come in the privacy of legal
research and writing, or did it come when the judges made up their minds
and took a vote? Rarely is the question asked. The failure to ask it has
deep roots, but it is a failure nonetheless. The distinction matters. It
matters particularly in international law, where the application function is
highly dispersed and the tribunals involved fundamentally different in
22
construction.
Case studies can easily devolve into meditations (or worse,
commentaries), but there are conclusions here. To judge by the ICJ's work
in the Barrier case, the intuition that international law is not law properly so
called is warranted. The manner of that court's work violated basic
principles of legality, and its judgment ultimately was not enforceable, nor
obligatory, nor objective. In fact, I think Legal Consequences cannot be
considered an artifact of law at all, and I will ultimately argue that to cite it
as legal authority is improper. But the Israeli High Court's work neither
wholly supports nor wholly refutes the intuition. Its judgment was
enforceable (was in fact enforced) and obligatory, but its analysis was so
drenched in judicial subjectivity as to put the legal character of the work as
a whole into question-a sort of quasi-law zone reminiscent of our more
strained constitutional law opinions in the United States (which also tend to
spur questions of whether the work was really law at all). And leaving
those two courts aside, international law itself does not support the
intuition. Even in dealing with a legal problem as intricate and novel as the
Barrier, in a context as charged as Israel's, international law proves
enforceable in the right circumstances, reasonably obligatory, and
22. The ICJ and Israeli High Court are a good example of just how differently
constructed the tribunals applying international law can be. Israeli High Court judges are
selected by a nine-person committee consisting of the chief justice, two other justices, and
representatives from the legislature, executive, and bar; Israel's executive and legislature
play no formal role beyond contributing representatives to the decision, and the judicial
appointment lasts until mandatory (age-based) retirement. See Basic Law: The Judiciary
§§ 4, 7, 1984, S.H. 78.. The process aims at judicial independence, and to the extent a
criticism is offered, insularity is the likely ground. By contrast, the ICJ's selection process
starts with state-based "national groups," which select candidates according to various
distributional rules (no two judges can be of the same nationality; each of the Security
Council's five permanent members gets one judge on the court; and the UN's five regional
blocs-Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe/other--divide up
the remaining ten seats). The candidates then run for office in the General Assembly and
Security Council, and those who win a bare majority in both bodies receive a nine-year term
on the court and may stand for reelection when it expires. See Statute of the International
Court of Justice arts. 3-4, 10, 13, June 26, 1945, 59 Stat. 1055, 3 Bevans 1153 [hereinafter
Statute of ICJ]; SHABTAI ROSENNE, THE WORLD COURT 52-64 (4th ed. 1989). This process
conceives of judges in a basically representative (in fact, national) capacity, and even its
stated goal is to have "the main forms of civilization" and "principal legal systems of the
world" represented. Statute of ICJ, supra, art. 9.
substantially objective. The stuff of law is in it. But the courts failed the
promise of the law.
My thesis, then, is this: any general claim that international law either is
or is not law properly so called is far too sweeping. International law in
action is sometimes law, and sometimes not, and sometimes comes awfully
close, depending on the particulars of case and court. What is needed as a
matter of jurisprudence is nuance. And what is needed as a matter of
jurisprudence and policy both is a distinction in the stance we take toward
international law, on the one hand, and toward the courts and other
institutions that interpret and apply international law, on the other. I call
this position "skeptical internationalism": it is a faithful friend to
international law as a project and in doctrinal content, but rebuttably
skeptical of the institutions charged with interpreting that content and
carrying that project out.
In short, I see international law as a very good piece of music being
played by some very bad orchestras. Our stance to it as lawyers should be
neither crude rejection nor crude acceptance, but a studied insistence that
international law as it is be brought closer to international law as it could
be.
I. PRINCIPLES OF LEGALITY AND THE BARRIER BETWEEN ISRAEL AND THE

WEST BANK
A. The InternationalCourt ofJustice in the BarrierCase

We'll get to the facts and law of the ICJ's Barrier opinion in a moment.
But there's a question we should cover first, and it requires a bit of context.
In October 2003, Syria, representing the Arab Group and League of Arab
States, sent a letter to the Security Council urging that it condemn Israel's
"expansionist conquest wall" as a violation of international law. 23 The
Security Council met on October 14, heard statements, and took a vote: ten
in favor (including permanent members Russia, China, and France), one
against (the United States), and four abstaining (including the last of the
permanent members, the United Kingdom). 24 The U.S. veto prevailed.
The next day, Syria brought the same request to the General Assembly,
which (lest the Security Council's prior vote block General Assembly
action) invoked its "emergency special session" authority to take up the
issue. 25 Meetings were held, statements heard; opposition to the Barrier
23. Letter Dated 9 October 2003 from the Permanent Representative of the Syrian Arab
Republic to the United Nations addressed to the President of the Security Council, U.N. Doc.
S/2003/973 (Oct. 9, 2003).
24. U.N. SCOR, 58th Sess., 4842d mtg. at 2, U.N. Doc. S/PV.4842 (Oct. 14, 2003);
U.N. SCOR, 58th Sess., 4841st mtg., U.N. Doc. S/PV.4841 (Oct. 14, 2003).
25. Under the UN Charter, "the General Assembly shall not make any recommendation"
on a matter over which the Security Council "is exercising ...the functions assigned to it in
the present Charter." U.N. Charter art. 12, para. 1. The emergency special session device
was developed to overcome that constraint: "[I]f the Security Council, because of lack of
2462 FORDHAMLAWREVIEW [Vol. 78
was intense and almost unanimous, with most of the talk pointed
exclusively against Israel, although a few countries made mention of
Palestinian wrongdoing as well. 26 (Diplomatically, this choice to wag the
finger at both parties or just one appears to be the crucial thing-although I
don't think it speaks much to what is legal, or very clearly to what is just.)
In the end, the Assembly passed Resolution ES-10/13, "[d]emand[ing] that
Israel stop and reverse the construction of the wall in the Occupied
Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, which is in
departure of the Armistice Line of 1949 and is in contradiction to relevant
provisions of international law." 27 The vote was 144 to 4 (Israel, the United
States, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands), with 12 abstaining. The
28
resolution also requested a report on the issue from the Secretary-General.
That came in November and stated that the Barrier "is in contradiction to
international law," "could damage the longer-term prospects for peace," and
29
"increases suffering among the Palestinian people."
In December, the Arab Group and League of Arab States requested that
the emergency special session resume and submitted a new draft resolution
to the General Assembly for approval. This one denounced the Barrier in
even stronger terms, stating that the Barrier amounts to "de facto
annexation," has a "devastating impact . . . on the Palestinian civilian
population," is regarded with "unanimous opposition by the international
community," and constitutes a "refus[al] to comply with international
law." 30 But the resolution also certified a question for the ICJ in its
advisory capacity:
What are the legal consequences arising from the construction of the
wall being built by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Occupied
Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, as
described in the report of the Secretary-General, considering the rules and
principles of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention
of 1949, and 31
relevant Security Council and General Assembly
resolutions?
unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the
maintenance of international peace and security... the General Assembly shall consider the
matter ..." Uniting for Peace, G.A. Res. 377, 1, U.N. Doc. A/1775 (Nov. 3, 1950). For
roughly the last thirty years, the General Assembly has used the device of the emergency
special session exclusively to work around and against Security Council policy as to Israel.
See infra note 33 and accompanying text.
26. U.N. GAOR, 10th Emergency Spec. Sess., 22d mtg., U.N. Doc. A/ES-1O/PV.22
(Oct. 21, 2003); U.N. GAOR, 10th Emergency Spec. Sess., 21st mtg., U.N. Doc. A/ES-
1O/PV.21 (Oct. 20, 2003).
27. G.A. Res. ES-10/13, 1, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-10/13 (Oct. 21, 2003).
28. Id. 3.
29. The Secretary-General, Report of the Secretary-General Prepared Pursuant to
GeneralAssembly Resolution ES-I 0/13, 30, delivered to the General Assembly, U.N. Doc.
A/ES-10/248 (Nov. 24, 2003) [hereinafter Report PreparedPursuant to ES-J0/13].
30. G.A. Res. ES-10/14, at 2-3, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-10/14 (Dec. 8, 2003).
31. Id. at 3. The phrasing alludes to the Security Council's 1970 request for an advisory
opinion on "the legal consequences for States of the continued presence of South Africa in
Namibia." S.C. Res. 284, 1, U.N. Doc. S/RES/284 (July 29, 1970).
The resolution passed with ninety in favor, eight against, and seventy-four
abstaining 32-- quite a divided vote, actually, with a strong flavor of the
developing versus the developed world (try holding the list of states voting
in favor up alongside the list of states in the G77 to see the match). But the
developing world is numerous, and, with the resolution approved, the case
came to the ICJ.
There are at least two possible interpretations of these events. One could
think Israel encountered strong opposition because its conduct was patently
illegal and unsupportable. Or one could see in these events evidence of an
animus against Israel within the United Nations-and also evidence of a
political strategy by the Barrier's national opponents to enlist the various
organs of the UN in the service of national goals, with an apparently
warranted confidence that all those various organs would agree to be
enlisted (except for the Security Council, and there only because of the
United States). I think this latter view is correct: the tone of events, the
situation's legal complexity (the Barrier was not "patently" anything), the
power and numbers of the Arab Group and League of Arab States (about
twenty-two states, some with oil), the history connected to the General
Assembly's resolutions about Israel (every emergency special session
resolution since 1982 has been directed against Israel), 33 and the advisory
32. U.N. GAOR, 10th Emergency Spec. Sess., 23d mtg., U.N. Doc. A/ES-10/PV.23
(Dec. 8, 2003).
33. The first resolution in the string declared that Israel "is not a peace-loving member
state" and called for all member states "[t]o sever diplomatic, trade and cultural relations
with Israel . . . in order totally to isolate it." G.A. Res. ES-9/1, 11-13, U.N. Doc.
A/RES/ES-9/1 (Feb. 5, 1982). Since then, and apart from a few nonsubstantive, procedural
resolutions, a comprehensive review of the General Assembly's emergency special session
resolutions shows that every one has been directed wholly or mainly against Israel. See G.A.
Res. ES-10/18, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-10/18 (Jan. 16, 2009) (demanding a ceasefire in Gaza
and a withdrawal of Israeli forces); G.A. Res. ES-10/17, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-10/17 (Dec.
15, 2006) (setting up an administrative agency to keep records of damage caused by the
Barrier); G.A. Res. ES-10/16, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-10/16 (Nov. 17, 2006) (condemning
Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip (though also rocket fire from Gaza into Israel)); G.A. Res.
ES-10/15, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-10/15 (July 20, 2004) (demanding Israeli compliance with
the ICJ Barrier opinion); G.A. Res. ES-10/14, supra note 30 (condemning the Barrier); G.A.
Res. ES-10/13, supra note 27 (same); G.A. Res. ES-10/12, at 1, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-10/12
(Sept. 19, 2003) (condemning Israeli "deportation[s]" and "extrajudicial killings" (though
also "[c]ondemning the suicide bombings")); G.A. Res. ES-10/ll, at 2, U.N. Doc.
AiRES/ES-10/11 (Aug. 5, 2002) (calling for an "end [to] the Israeli occupation"); G.A. Res.
ES-10/10, at 1, U.N. Doc. AIRES/ES-10/10 (May 7, 2002) (denouncing Israeli human rights
violations at the Jenin refugee camp); G.A. Res. ES-10/9, at 1, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-10/9
(Dec. 20, 2001) (denouncing Israeli violations of the Geneva Conventions during the Second
Intifada); G.A. Res. ES-10/8, at 1, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-10/8 (Dec. 20, 2001) (emphasizing
that the PLO is "the indispensable and legitimate party for peace"); G.A. Res. ES-10/7, at 1-
2, U.N. Doc. A/RESIES-10/7 (Oct. 20, 2000) (assigning responsibility for the Second
Intifada to Sharon's "provocative visit to A1-Haram Al-Sharif' and condemning the resulting
"acts of violence," especially "the excessive use of force by the Israeli forces against
Palestinian civilians"); G.A. Res. ES-10/6, at 3, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-10/6 (Feb. 9, 1999)
(noting "deterioration of the Middle East peace process as a result of the lack of compliance
by the Government of Israel with the existing agreements" and demanding an end to "illegal
Israeli activities"); G.A. Res. ES-10/5, at 1, U.N. Doe. A/RES/ES-10/5 (Mar. 17, 1998)
(denouncing Israeli violations of the Geneva Conventions); G.A. Res. ES-10/4, at 2, U.N.
2464 FORDHAM LAWREVIEW [Vol. 78
request itself (which stated that the Barrier was both wrong and illegal in
the very request for legal advice on that point) strike me as decisive.
Perhaps some readers will share this view; certainly some will not. But I
don't mention the view to endorse it. I mention it to discount it.
It is tempting to view the partisan origins of the Barrier case in the UN as
damning to the UN's court, presumptively undermining its claim to be
doing law rather than the work of its side. But there is a certain naivet6 in
that view, and indeed something perfectly backwards about its logic. Most
big public law cases have partisan origins. And every case presents itself to
a court with at least two parties, who are types, who are symbols, who
contend with each other amidst the passions inevitably kindled by the
people and things they represent-officer and suspect, official and activist,
executive and employee, on and on and on, and everywhere the fires of
alliance and hostility, sympathy and indifference, and that most complex
and powerful sentiment of all, identification. The question is not whether
these forces are at work, but whether those entrusted with the law yield to
them. The institutional setting of the United Nations in which the Barrier
case took place may well have been imbalanced, but in the end, the ICJ was
alone with the question of whether the Barrier was legal. That is a fair
question, however it came to be asked, and there is no reason in principle
why it could not be answered in accord with our expectations for law as
law.
1. Principles of Legality and Finding Facts
Finding facts in the right way is part of what it means for a court to be
engaged in the work of law as law. It is among the principles of legality-
though it doesn't usually get its jurisprudential due. Scholarship and
teaching typically focus on knotty (appellate) legal problems, or policy, or
theory insofar as it falls on the "law" side of the "law/facts" distinction;
indeed that very distinction can give the impression that fact-finding is a
subordinate part of the legal enterprise, if a part of it at all. But actually, in
most cases the law is pretty clear and what courts fundamentally exist for,
their social function, is to resolve disputes of fact. 34 The power to make
Doc. A/RES/ES-10/4 (Nov. 13, 1997) (denouncing the settlements); G.A. Res. ES-10/3, at
1-2, U.N. Doc. AIRES/ES-10/3 (July 15, 1997) (same); G.A. Res. ES-10/2, at 2-3, U.N.
Doc. AiRES/ES-10/2 (Apr. 25, 1997) (same); G.A. Res. ES-7/9, 1, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-
7/9 (Sept. 24, 1982) (condemning "the criminal massacre of Palestinian and other civilians in
Beirut"); G.A. Res. ES-7/8, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-7/8 (Aug. 19, 1982) (noting the "children
victims of Israel's acts of aggression"); G.A. Res. ES-7/7, at 1, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-7/7
(Aug. 19, 1982) (attributing "the explosive situation in the Middle East" to "Israeli
aggression"); G.A. Res. ES-7/6, U.N. Doc. A/RESiES-7/6 (Aug. 19, 1982) (condemning
Israeli military activities in Lebanon); G.A. Res. ES-7/5, U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-7/5 (June 26,
1982) (same); G.A. Res. ES-7/4, 7-8, 11 U.N. Doc. A/RES/ES-7/4 (Apr. 28, 1982)
(denouncing Israeli "[riepressive measures," such as "[s]hooting and killing and wounding
of worshippers," condemning the "misuse" by the United States of its veto power on Israel's
behalf, and declaring again that Israel "is not a peace-loving Member State").
34. See 3 WILLtAM BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES *330 ("[E]xperience will abundantly
sh[o]w, that above a hundred of our lawsuits arise from disputed facts, for one where the law
findings of fact in instances of dispute is scarcely less remarkable or

distinctive than the power "to say what the law is." 35 And not only do
judicial opinions almost always include a statement of fact, but they could
not imaginably do otherwise in most cases-which is to say that it is
difficult to conceive of law in action without considering it in relation to
facts (for it is intrinsic to the application function that little pictures of the
world are contained within a structure of practical reason, and naturally an
essential issue is the relationship of those pictures of the world to the world
as it is). My point is not just that the factual aspect of the law deserves a
greater share of attention, but that factuality is so much a part of the basic
architecture of the legal enterprise that it should be regarded as having
essential and not merely incidental significance in thinking about that
enterprise's nature.
Now, there is a great deal that might be said about factuality in the law,
but three points are, in my view, at the root of the matter. First, it seems to
be socially necessary to make certain claims of fact binding as a matter of
law-that is, to establish facts, putting the authority of the law behind a
declaration as to how the world is rather than an imperative as to what may
or may not be done. This establishing is what it means for a court to "find"
facts, and it is among courts' most characteristic and essential functions.
Second, the way a fact becomes binding as a matter of law (at least in the
courtroom) is by partaking of the law's process. A driver's statement that
he did not run the red light is a mere assertion; that same assertion, if
certainly true and known to be true (say there was a video of the
intersection) is a (mere) item of knowledge and truth about the world; but a
jury's finding that the driver did not run the red light, after the driver has
become a defendant and the recording examined in court-thatis a claim of
fact with the mark of the law on it. Finally, there is a certain logical
minimum to any such factual process in the law, at least insofar as the facts
are disputed and the process is rational: the fact-finder must have the legal
authority to establish facts; he or she or it must hear the claims of fact in
question; and he or she or it must engage and decide among the competing
claims on the basis of reason-that is, in light of arguments and evidence
and the like, and with the kind of good faith that makes the scrutiny real
rather than farce. That is to say that facts, to be part of the law's process,
must become the subject of deliberation-specifically,of the deliberative
36
activity known as adjudication.
is doubted of."). Though actually I am paraphrasing here a point from John Langbein-a
point that has been a leitmotif of his career: "The main work of a legal system is deciding
matters of past fact.... Was the traffic light red or green? Was it O.J. Simpson or somebody
else who wielded the dagger? Find the facts and the law is usually easy." John H. Langbein,
HistoricalFoundationsof the Law of Evidence: A View from the Ryder Sources, 96 COLUM.
L. REv. 1168, 1168 (1996).
35. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 177 (1803).
36. Law is full of delegated fact-finding, of course, as with special masters, ERISA
fiduciaries, or administrative agencies, but I do not think these special cases require altering
the account just laid out. A delegatee may administer the factual process, provided it is still
In the Barrier case, there are basically two sets of factual questions-the
first concerning the Barrier itself (how much land past the Green Line does
it take? for what purpose? to what effect on the Palestinian people?) and the
second concerning the security threat facing Israel (how substantial is it?
where does it come from? can the Barrier temper it?). As to the Barrier
itself, the ICJ states that, on the basis of the existing construction and
planned route, "approximately 975 square kilometres (or 16.6 per cent of
the West Bank) would ...lie between the Green Line and the wall."'37 That
area, the ICJ says, is "home to 237,000 Palestinians," who could come and
go only through "access gates, which are opened infrequently and for short
periods" and who would need "a permit or identity card issued by the Israeli
authorities" to continue living there. 38 That same area, the ICJ explains, is
also home to "nearly 320,000 Israeli settlers (of whom 178,000 in East
Jerusalem)," and "it is apparent from an examination of the map.. . that the
wall's sinuous route has been traced in such a way as to include within that
area the great majority of the Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian
Territory (including East Jerusalem). ' 39 Those Israeli settlers would not
need a permit to remain in the area, nor would other Israelis need a permit
to move there. Finally, "[i]f the full wall were completed as planned,
another 160,000 Palestinians would live in almost completely encircled
40
communities" or "enclaves."
As to facts about the security threat, there is something remarkable to
report: the ICJ's opinion makes almost no mention of Palestinian violence
at all. The word "terrorism" (or its variants) is used five times in the (sixty-
eight-page) opinion, four times in direct and once in indirect quotation-but
never in the ICJ's own mouth. 4 1 Nor are related terms ("suicide bombing"
and the like) ever used or discussed. Past instances of armed conflict in the
region are so described as to eliminate any sense of aggression against
Israel. 42 And the opinion never states that Palestinian violence is illegal.
Indeed, there is just one passage in which it is acknowledged that
Palestinian violence, as a factual matter, exists:
The fact remains that Israel has to face numerous indiscriminate and
deadly acts of violence against its civilian population. It has the right, and
indeed the duty, to respond in order to protect the life of its citizens. The
the law's process. The delegator (the court) typically retains the power of review, and with it
the responsibility to ensure that the integrity of that process was preserved in the delegatee's
hands. And where that power is lacking, or review entirely supine, we would not say the
facts were "found," as a legal matter, at all.
37. Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian
Territory, Advisory Opinion, 2004 I.C.J. 136, 170 (July 9).
38. Id. at 170-71.
39. Id. at 170, 183.
40. Id. at 170.
41. Id. at 157, 182, 187, 194.
42. See, e.g., id. at 165-66 ("The Arab population of Palestine and the Arab States
rejected this plan [the 1947 UN resolution establishing a Jewish state], contending that it was
unbalanced... ; armed conflict then broke out ....).
measures taken are bound 43nonetheless to remain in conformity with

applicable international law.
But because these three sentences appear very near the last page of the
opinion, where they can give rise to no further reasoning because all the
facts have already been found and all the law already decided, and because
the third sentence arrests the movement of the first two with the dumb force
of a truism, the trio as a whole functions as the quintessential pro forma
acknowledgement-a creature of political rhetoric whose purpose is not
actually to acknowledge but only to stave off challenge.
Let's pause for a moment to register the enormity of these claims and
omissions of fact. 16.6% of the West Bank would be, for the United States,
a greater territorial area than the entire Atlantic seaboard, Maine to Florida,
plus California. 44 The number of Palestinians involved (nearly 400,000)
registers on the scale of natural disasters. 4 5 And that "sinuous route"
around the settlements, together with requiring permits of the Palestinians
(but not the Israelis) for the right to live in their homes, gives the whole
affair the look of a land grab. At the same time, to effectively eliminate
Palestinian violence from the law's factual understanding of the world in a
case concerned with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is simply staggering-
like reality in a funhouse mirror, the law's picture of the world cleaved from
the world as we know it. And of course the consequence is that one party's
entire position (half the case really) goes up in smoke. Having recognized
all this, however, we need to register quite another point: that these claims
and omissions of fact never partook of the law's process. They are not legal
facts-not a part or product of the law-at all.
The ICJ's fact-finding process (its process altogether, in fact) was,
compared to most courtroom processes, unusually simple. It was not
adversarial; Israel boycotted the proceedings except to submit a lengthy
written statement describing the security threat and denying the ICJ's
jurisdiction. 46 Beyond that, first, the court permitted written statements
from member states and state organizations (e.g., the European Union and
League of Arab States), as well as "Palestine" (via special observer
status). 47 These were mostly position papers; the European Union's, for
example, consisted of a one-page letter stating that an advisory opinion
would be "inappropriate" because it would "not help . . . re-launch a
political dialogue," plus some annexed EU statements opposing the Barrier
itself.4 8 Second, the court held hearings for three days in February 2004, at
43. Id. at 195.

44. U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, U.S. DEP'T OF COMMERCE, UNITED STATES SUMMARY: 2000:
POPULATION AND HOUSING UNIT COUNTS 29 tbl. 17 (2004), availableat http://www.census.gov/
prod/cen2000/phc3-us-pt 1.pdf.
45. See supra notes 38, 40 and accompanying text.
46. See Israeli Statement to ICJ, supra note 10.
47. See Palestinian Statement to ICJ, supra note 8.
48. See Statement of Ireland on Behalf of the European Union, Legal Consequences of
the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Jan. 30, 2004), available at
http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/131/1615.pdf.
which twenty-three speakers spoke, all opposed to the Barrier and most
representing members of the League of Arab States. 49 Third, the court
studied a map of the Barrier's route on the Israeli Ministry of Defence
website. 50 Fourth, the Secretary-General's office sent the court a large
dossier of background material, much of which wasn't factually oriented,
but some of which was; 5 1 the court in particular cited three UN human
rights reports detailing the burdens that the Barrier imposed on the
Palestinian people. 52 And fifth, the Secretary-General's office sent two
reports of its own, providing factual follow-ups to the General Assembly's
two resolutions. 53 These two reports from the Secretary-General were
overwhelmingly the most important items in the set for factual purposes.
The ICJ states that, in describing the Barrier and its effects, it is "basing
itself' on the two reports, and virtually every factual statement the ICJ
makes with respect to annexation and security is referenced to the pair
(including all factual statements discussed above, except for the remark
about the Barrier's "sinuous route," which is attributed to a study of the
map on the Israeli website). 54 The human rights reports are cited in the
ICJ's discussion of human and humanitarian rights, but do not bear on the
annexation and security issues. 55 And the various written and oral
statements, including Israel's, have no perceptible effect on the ICJ's
factual conclusions.
In light of this process, should we say that the material claims of fact
were heard? I think this is a close call, but the record was certainly scant.
All that mattered factually were the Secretary-General's two reports, one of
49. See Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian
Territory, Advisory Opinion, 2004 I.C.J. 136, 143-44 (July 9); Oral Statements, Legal
Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Feb.
=
23-25, 2004), available at http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/index.php?pl=3&p2=4&k
5a&case= 131&code=mwp&p3=2.
50. Legal Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at 168.
51. Request for Advisory Opinion, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in
the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Dec. 8, 2003), available at http://www.icj-
cij.org/docket/files/131/1497.pdf (including a dossier of documents from the Secretary-
General).
52. Legal Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at 190-91; U.N. Econ. & Soc. Council [ECOSOC],
Comm'n on Human Rights, The Right to Food: Report by the Special Rapporteur, Jean
Ziegler, Addendum: Mission to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, U.N. Doc.
E/CN.4/2004/10/Add.2 (Oct. 31, 2003) (prepared by Jean Ziegler); U.N. Econ. & Soc.
Council [ECOSOC], Comm'n on Human Rights, Report of the Special Rapporteur of the
Commission on Human Rights, John Dugard, On the Situation of Human Rights in the
Palestinian Territories Occupied by Israel Since 1967, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/2004/6 (Sept. 8,
2003) (preparedby John Dugard); Special Comm. To Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting
the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories, Report of the Special
Committee To Investigate Israeli PracticesAffecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian
People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories,U.N. Doc. A158/311 (Aug. 22, 2003).
53. See Written Statement of the Secretary-General of the United Nations Organization,
Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
(Jan. 29, 2004), available at http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/131/1557.pdf; Report
PreparedPursuantto ES-10/13, supra note 29.
55. Id. at 190-91.
which did not mention the security threat at all and the other of which
contained just three phrases about it: one stating that Israel began
construction of the Barrier "[a]fter a sharp rise in Palestinian terror attacks
in the spring of 2002";56 a second acknowledging "Israel's right and duty to
protect its people against terrorist attacks .... [But not] in a way that is in
contradiction to international law" (perhaps the source of the ICJ's similar
formulation?); 57 and a third which, in summarizing Israel's legal position,
cited Israeli officials' claim that "the Barrier has contributed to a significant
decline in the number of attacks inside Israel."' 58 These three statements
make for a thin record in a case that depended significantly on facts about
59
security.
The next necessary element of legal fact-finding (given the framework
laid out above) is engaging and deciding among competing claims of fact
on the basis of reason, adjudicating the facts. This is where the really
decisive problems with the ICJ's work arise. Notice that in the description
of the ICJ's process above, there is no instance of an evidentiary hearing or
documentary process in which anyone-a lawyer, a party, the judges
themselves-put alleged facts to the test. The ICJ's factual claims were not
the conclusion of a process of scrutiny because there was no such process.
Never was evidence taken, nor arguments as to how to interpret factual
claims considered. Never were the Secretary-General's factual claims
reviewed, nor the possibility of review considered. Actually, only once in
its opinion does the ICJ acknowledge directly the existence of a factual
dispute (and having done so, the court moves on without comment). 60 In
the end, there was only this: the Secretary-General stated facts, and the ICJ
repeated them. I cannot discern a sense in which that repeating could be
considered a deliberative act. What we have here, in effect, is an instance
of pure executive fact-finding under a presumption of correctness so
irrebuttable that the possibility of error and falsehood is never even
considered. But that is not the law's way of coming to its picture of the
world. The ICJ's facts were not adjudicated, but delivered.
There is one last issue concerning the legal character of the ICJ's findings
of fact: the issue of good faith. It is quite difficult to believe that the ICJ's
minimization of Israel's factual claims could be innocent when the issue is
56. Report PreparedPursuantto ES-10/13, supra note 29, 4.

57. Id. 30.
58. Id. Annex 1, 6.
59. The ICJ's lone dissenter (and lone American), Judge Thomas Buergenthal, cited
these factual shortcomings as the reason for his dissent: "I am compelled to vote against the
Court's findings on the merits because the Court did not have before it the requisite factual
bases for its sweeping findings; it should therefore have declined to hear the case." Legal
Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at 240 (Buergenthal, J., dissenting). Judges Pieter Kooijmans and
Hisashi Owada sounded similar concerns in their concurrences, id. at 223 (separate opinion
of Judge Kooijmans); id. at 268-69 (separate opinion of Judge Owada), though they still
voted with the majority.
60. Id. at 182 (majority opinion) ("For its part, Israel has argued that the wall's sole
purpose is to enable it effectively to combat terrorist attacks launched from the West
Bank.... [and] repeatedly stated that the Barrier is a temporary measure .... ").
so obvious and the concealment so studied. Bad legal briefs often try to
ignore the facts on the other side, of course, but judicial opinions are not
supposed to do that precisely because they are not supposed to have a side.
The minimization is fashioned just so as to undermine Israel's legal position
down the line. (How could the claim that the Barrier was built to guard
against terrorism get off the ground when terrorism has disappeared from
the law's picture of the world?) And what is most sinister about the whole
business is the sense of coordination within the UN's governing structure in
the production of the distortion, with the General Assembly teeing up a
loaded question for the Secretary-General to furnish with a partial account
of facts for the ICJ to endorse without ever admitting the possibility of
doubt or question 6 1-as if pitcher, hitter, and umpire were all working
together to produce a home run highlight for the nightly news. Few
assertions of power are so profound as the ability of ruling bureaucracies to
establish official pictures of the world that everyone knows are false. Now,
I earlier counted good faith as a necessary component of the law's factual
process because, without it, the appearance of hearing, engaging, and
deciding among competing claims of fact on the basis of reason is just a
sort of farce-the theater of process one finds in conditions of bias. 62 If this
jurisprudential thought is correct, and if the ICJ did indeed exhibit bad faith
with regard to the facts in the Barrier case, that bad faith is a further reason
to expel those facts from the law's estate.
My essential factual argument is now in view, but one further point is in
order. I have so far been making a jurisprudential argument about the
preconditions of legal fact-finding, and some readers may think, "Well,
perhaps the ICJ's facts were lacking something from a procedural point of
view, but they are nonetheless reliable as facts." This is a mistake; the
procedural problems just discussed strike at accuracy as well as legality.
As to the security threat facing Israel, it is of course the case that one
cannot omit crucial facts without distortion any more than one can misstate
them without distortion. (Imagine a complaint alleging tortious battery
while failing to mention that the fight was a boxing match and the plaintiff
consented.) As to the hard, putatively objective facts about the Barrier and
its effects (the quantity of land taken, the number of Palestinians affected,
the administrative regime, etc.), the Israeli High Court directly contradicts
the ICJ's claims. 6 3 It's not easy to know which court to believe, but the
61. See supra text accompanying notes 23-33.

62. See generally HARPER LEE, To KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1960) (telling the fictional but
resonant and revealing story of a jury in the old South that convicts a black man of raping a
white woman after the rape is proved in court to have been physically impossible).
Courtroom process is not self-policing. All it takes to make a farce of it is a dash of hubris, a
pinch of self-deception, and plenty of authority.
63. See HCJ 2056/04 Beit Sourik Vill. Council v. Gov't of Isr. [2004] IsrSC 58(5) 807,
860, translatedin 43 I.L.M. 1099, 1127 (2004) (stating that the parts of the Barrier there
challenged affect a total of 35,000 Palestinians and take 34,000 dunams (34 square
kilometers) of the West Bank). Beit Sourik involved only a small portion of the total length
of the Barrier, complicating the ICJIsraeli High Court comparison. But a second major case
2010) SKEPTICAL INTERNATIONALISM 2471
Israeli process was more substantial (as discussed below) and the
disagreement itself should in any case give one pause. And as to the more
subtle issue of the Barrier's "sinuous route" around the settlements, one can
agree that that route is suspicious while still appreciating that it is not self-
interpreting. Consider: If the Barrier were, as Israel claimed, based on
security considerations alone with no territorial ambitions in the mix, would
it follow the Green Line? Why? The Green Line is itself just a political
line, with no relevance for the sorts of considerations (high ground, line of
sight, etc.) at issue in a purely military operation. 64 Furthermore, even if
the Israeli government regarded the settlements as wholly illegal (as I
regard them, incidentally), it does not follow from their illegality that the
Barrier could not protect them from violence. A government can protect its
law-breaking citizens, and if Israel's government believed that the Barrier
was necessary for that purpose, it could not reasonably build along the
Green Line and leave the settlers out past it to take their chances. 6 5 The
point here is not to deny that the Barrier was built around the settlements
(that much is "apparent from an examination of the map") but just to show
that the import of that fact is ambiguous enough that we could wish for a
process in which alternative interpretations were brought to light and put to
the test-and that the ICJ's leap from suspicion to condemnation was much
too hasty. Actually, I suspect a lot of people wonder why Israel didn't just
build along the Green Line, and a lot of doubts about the Barrier's legality
rest (not unreasonably) on some form of the ICJ's suspicion that building a
wall or fence between Israel and the West Bank that puts the settlements on
the Israeli side of the line indicates a land grab. But there are good
responses to that suspicion, and bad ones as well, and we should not in
making a legal judgment as to facts treat the issue as if it were self-evident.
Thus the ICJ's omissions and interpretations and even hard claims of fact
come in for challenge and doubt, until at some point the whole factual
edifice the ICJ gives us starts to quake. Perhaps the Barrier really is
temporary. Perhaps it really is annexationist. Based on what the ICJ gives
us, we have finally no idea what the facts about the Barrier are. And that is
on the Barrier came to the Israeli court in 2005, and, seizing the opportunity to lodge its
response to the ICJ, the Israeli court there directly challenged the ICJ's hard claims of fact-
indeed by orders of magnitude, contending for example that the Barrier took 8300 dunams of
agricultural land, rather than 100,000 as the ICJ had claimed-as well as the ICJ's factual
omissions, interpretations, and process. HCJ 7957/04 Mara'abe v. The Prime Minister of Isr.
[2005], translatedin 45 I.L.M. 202, 226-32 (2006).
64. The point is stressed in Beit Sourik, IsrSC 58(5) at 831, translated in 43 I.L.M at
1109.
65. The issue came up directly in the Israeli High Court's second major Barrier case in
2005, and the court-reasoning that the law of occupation requires occupiers to protect
public safety, and that Israel's Basic Law requires the state to protect its citizens' lives-
ruled "that the military commander is authorized to construct a separation fence in the area
for the purpose of defending the lives and safety of the Israeli settlers in the area," for "[t]he
life of a person who is in the area illegally is not up for the taking," and "[ilt is not relevant
whatsoever to this conclusion to examine whether this settlement activity conforms to
international law or defies it." Mara 'abe, 45 I.L.M. at 210.
exactly how we ought to feel, for the law's factual process aims generally at
accuracy within the bounds of respect for individual rights, and we should
not think we know the truth about a case when a court neglects that process
so completely.
2. Principles of Legality and Applying Law
The Barrier case concerns basically three legal issues: annexation,
human and humanitarian rights, and security. There is already a substantial
body of literature about the ICJ's handling of these issues (particularly the
latter two), the bulk of it critical, alleging serious error and bad judgment
and, occasionally, cautious suggestions of judicial bias. 66 I don't wish to
repeat all this previous work. My question is different: I would like to
know whether, in interpreting and applying the law, the ICJ's work was
sufficiently consistent with minimal principles of legality to be considered
law properly so called. That there was error and bad judgment does not
answer this question; a court's reasoning can go awry without obviating the
legal character of its work, or every poor judgment would be an extralegal
one. A different type of inquiry is needed. I'll argue that the ICJ's
handling of annexation does conform to minimal principles of legality and
should qualify as law properly so called (although, for reasons explained
more fully in Part I.C, I think the conclusion is erroneous-again, not the
same thing as nonlegal). The ICJ's handling of human and humanitarian
rights should not qualify as law properly so called, although the issue is a
close one. And its handling of security fell dramatically short of even
minimal principles of legality.
The ICJ's central holding was that constructing the Barrier past the Green
Line illegally annexed Palestinian land. The principle at work here is of
course the principle of non-annexation-what the ICJ called the "customary
rule" of "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war." 67 That
way of putting it is vague enough for misunderstanding, however, and a
little explanation is in order here regarding both the content and foundations
of this principle.
First, what is illegal under the principle is not to take territory by force
but to annex territory by force (or threat of force)-that is, to take territory
in perpetuity or under a claim of right, to take sovereignty. Second,
although now customary, the prohibition is intricately and extensively
grounded in text and treaty. Some explanation is necessary here. There
was once something in international law called "the right of conquest": a
prince could expand his kingdom by conquering his neighbor, and not just
expand literally, physically, in virtue of having taken the territory, but
66. See, e.g., Symposium, Agora: ICJ Advisory Opinion on Construction of a Wall in
the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 99 AM. J. INT'L L. 1 (2005); Symposium, Domestic and
InternationalJudicial Review of the Construction of the SeparationBarrier,38 ISR. L. REv.
6 (2005).
Territory, Advisory Opinion, 2004 I.C.J. 136, 166, 182 (July 9).
legally, in that the conquest was understood to work a transfer of title. 68 At

the heart of twentieth century international public law has been the rejection
of the right of conquest-a rejection codified in the UN Charter's "principle
of... self-determination of peoples" and prohibition on "the threat or use
of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any
state," and in the several treaties concerning belligerent occupation (in fact,
in the very idea of belligerent occupation, for if it were legal to take title by
taking territory, then the practical power of controlling another's territory
would not usher in a state of occupation but an expanded kingdom). 69 But
what replaced the right of conquest was not an absolute requirement that no
state ever lay an unasked-for hand on another's territory. Aggressive war to
take territory is illegal, but some war (defensive war, for example) is legal,
and to take an enemy's territory in the course of fighting a legal war-to
take and to hold it until the aggressor yields and the threat is subdued, as the
allies took Germany and Japan in World War II, and as Israel on some
views took the West Bank in the 1967 war-is both legal and a very
important military goal, provided no assertions of sovereignty are
70
involved.
What the ICJ should have said is that the UN Charter, along with other
international instruments, locks into the bedrock of international law the
principle that force cannot legally transfer title. That is what it means to
68. See generally SHARON KORMAN, THE RIGHT OF CONQUEST: THE ACQUISITION OF
TERRITORY By FORCE IN INTERNATIONAL LAW AND PRACTICE (1996).
69. U.N. Charter art. 1, para. 2; id. art. 2, para. 4; Geneva Convention Relative to the
Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War art. 47, Aug. 12, 1949, 6 U.S.T 3516, 75
U.N.T.S. 287 [hereinafter Geneva Convention IV] (prohibiting "any annexation by the
[occupying power] of the whole or part of the occupied territory"); EYAL BENVENISTI, THE
INTERNATIONAL LAW OF OCCUPATION 5 (1993) [hereinafter BENVENISTI, LAW OF
OCCUPATION] ("The foundation upon which the entire law of occupation is based is the
principle of inalienability of sovereignty through the actual or threatened use of force.");
KORMAN, supra note 68, at 133 ("Two important developments have taken place in this
century which have led to the renunciation or apparent renunciation by states of the right of
conquest. The first is the unequivocal adoption by international society, after the First World
War, of the principle of self-determination... and the second is the legal prohibition of the
use of force by states .... "). Note that Benvenisti locates the idea of self-determination and
the renunciation of conquest much earlier than Korman, in the political ideas of the French
Revolution and the legal developments of the nineteenth century, rather than in the two
world wars. See Eyal Benvenisti, The Origins of the Concept of Belligerent Occupation, 26
LAW & HIST. REv. 621, 624-25 (2008).
70. See MYRES S. McDOUGAL & FLORENTINO P. FELICIANO, THE INTERNATIONAL LAW
OF WAR: TRANSNATIONAL COERCION AND WORLD PUBLIC ORDER 222-23 (1994); 2 LASSA
OPPENHEIM, INTERNATIONAL LAW 432 (Hersch Lauterpacht ed., 7th ed. 1952). There is
controversy still about whether a state's territory remains inviolable once it has engaged in
aggressive war and been defeated by other states engaged in lawful war. For a
comprehensive review of the arguments and a defense of the claim that international law
does and should preserve aggressors' territory intact (although permitting minor border
adjustments for the sake of neighbors' security), see KORMAN, supra note 68, at 199-234.
As for the controversy about whether Israel's conduct in 1967 was defensive, see YORAM
DINSTEIN, WAR, AGGRESSION AND SELF-DEFENCE 180--81 (1988) and THOMAS M. FRANCK,
RECOURSE TO FORCE: STATE ACTION AGAINST THREATS AND ARMED ATTACKS 101-05
(2002).
2474 FORDHAM LA W REVIEW [Vol. 78
say, as is certainly true, that Israel cannot use the Barrier to annex
Palestinian territory in the West Bank. But having stated that legal rule, we
must apply it, and there we come to a problem: Israel did not assert title or
sovereignty over the parts of the West Bank to the west of the Barrier. On
the contrary, Israel claimed (as the ICJ notes) that "the Barrier is a
temporary measure"; 71 that its "sole purpose is to enable [Israel] effectively
to combat terrorist attacks"; 72 that it "'does not annex territories to the State
74
of Israel"'; 73 that it "'is not a border and has no political significance'";
that it "'does not change the legal status of the territory in any way'; 75 and
that Israel stands "'ready and able, at tremendous cost, to adjust or
dismantle [it] if so required as part of a political settlement.", 76 With no
claim of sovereignty, the ICJ needs to provide some sort of argument for
why the Barrier amounts to an annexation anyway. And it does so-
actually it provides three such arguments.
The first argument is basically a feint: at various points, the court
suggests that the Occupation itself, Israel's presence in the West Bank
altogether, might be illegal. 77 The details of this position aren't clear. One
cannot tell whether the ICJ is implying that the Occupation was illegal
when it began in 1967, or morphed into an annexation due to its singular
length (forty-three years and counting!), or became illegal due to its
connection with other annexationist conduct, such as the settlements. 78 One
cannot tell, in fact, whether the ICJ really means the point at all, since it
never goes quite so far as to state it directly. Under these circumstances, I
think we can pass over this argument.
The second argument also does not receive the court's full attention,
though it is more firmly expressed (and in my view, quite a good
argument): "The Court considers that the construction of the wall and its
associated regime create a 'fait accompli' on the ground that could well
become permanent, in which case, and notwithstanding the formal
characterization of the wall by Israel, it would be tantamount to de facto
annexation." 79 This is essentially an effects-based test for annexation; the

72. Id.
73. Id. (quoting U.N. SCOR, 4841st mtg., supra note 24, at 10 (statement of Israel)).
74. Id. (quoting U.N. GAOR ES-10, 23d mtg., supra note 32, at 6 (statement of Israel)).
75. Id.
76. Id. (quoting U.N. SCOR, 4841 st mtg., supra note 24, at 10 (statement of Israel)).
77. See, e.g., id. In fact, the ICJ's Egyptian judge, Nabil Elaraby, said in a newspaper
interview just before joining the court, "Israel is occupying Palestinian territory, and the
occupation itself is against international law." Aziza Sami, Nabil Elaraby: A Law for All
Nations, AL-AHRAM WKLY. ONLINE, Aug. 16-22, 2001, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/
2001/547/profile.htm. Israel lodged a formal challenge with the ICJ to Elaraby's
participation in the case, but the court voted to keep him on board, thirteen to one. See Legal
Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Req. for
Advisory Op.) (Order of Jan. 30, 2004) 5, available at http://www.icj-
cij.org/docket/files/131/1533.pdf.
78. For general background on these issues, see THE ISRAEL-ARAB READER, supra note 8.
suggestion is that the Barrier might change facts on the ground

(demographics, for example, as Israelis move into and Palestinians move
out of the West Bank land on the Israeli side of the Barrier) in such a way
as to make a restoration of the Green Line untenable in the future. Facts on
the ground in the region have crept into the law before-as, for example,
with the Green Line itself, which was established on condition that it not
"prejudice ...future territorial settlements or boundary lines or . . . claims
of either Party" 80 but which the ICJ vociferously treats as the legal limit of
Israel's territory. (The court shows no signs of seeing the irony.) But
again, as a matter of assessing the ICJ's work as the work of law, I think we
must pass over this argument. Important questions like, "Is an effects-based
approach to annexation correct?" and "Can the Barrier be enjoined on the
grounds that it 'could well' become permanent?" received no attention. The
ICJ's whole focus was on the third argument.
The ICJ's third and chief argument for thinking the Barrier constitutes an
annexation has everything to do with the settlements. Actually, so much of
the opinion concerns the settlements that the Barrier can start to seem like
an afterthought. Page after page argues that the settlements violate the anti-
annexation principle, various Security Council resolutions, and the Fourth
Geneva Convention. 8 1 The opinion climaxes with the sentence, "The Court
concludes that the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
(including East Jerusalem) have been established in breach of international
law."8 2 Immediately after this sentence, with nary an intervening word, we 83
get the additional conclusion that the Barrier is also an illegal annexation.
But why isn't that a non sequitur? In a key passage, the court tells us that
"the route chosen for the wall gives expression in loco to the illegal 84
measures taken by Israel with regard to Jerusalem and the settlements,"
but what exactly does that mean? Are the settlements serving here as
circumstantial evidence that the Barrier has an annexationist purpose? Or is
it that the settlements are based on an annexationist policy in which the
Barrier, in some sense, partakes? Or is the notion that the settlements
80. General Armistice Agreement, Isr.-Jordan, art. 6.9, Apr. 3, 1949, 42 U.N.T.S. 303.
81. The key Fourth Geneva provision is article 49, paragraph 6: "The Occupying Power
shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."
Geneva Convention IV, supra note 69, art. 49, para. 6. Since 1971, Israel's official position
has been that the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply de jure to the Occupied
Territory (because the territory did not belong to a High Contracting Party prior to the
occupation), but that Israel will apply the Convention's humanitarian provisions de facto.
See BENVENISTI, LAW OF OCCUPATION, supra note 69, at 109-12. Israel's Supreme Court
has for decades responded by holding the executive to its word on the Convention's
humanitarian provisions while avoiding the larger issue. See, e.g., HCJ 2056/04 Beit Sourik
Vill. Council v. Gov't of Isr. [2004] IsrSC 58(5) 807, 827, translatedin 43 I.L.M. 1099,
1107-08 (2004). The UN Security Council, meanwhile, has stated unequivocally that the
Convention does apply and that the settlements are illegal. S.C. Res. 465, U.N. Doc.
S/RES/465 (Mar. 1, 1980); S.C. Res. 452, U.N. Doc. S/RES/452 (July 20, 1979); S.C. Res.
446, U.N. Doc. S/RES/446 (Mar. 22, 1979).
83. Id.
84. Id.
constitute an annexation that the Barrier aids and abets to the extent it
protects them?
I don't think the ICJ gives us the material to pin it down on this point,
and that is a failure of rigor. But I take it that the basic thought is clear
enough: the ICJ holds that the Barrier is illegal because the settlements are
illegal, that it constitutes an annexation because it contributes to them and
they constitute an annexation. Certainly one could raise objections to this
argument. I will disagree with it later on-not because I think the
settlements are legal (I do not), but because I don't think they are the main
issue in evaluating the Barrier. 85 And one could wish for more rigor. But
vagueness and even error notwithstanding, I do not think it can be
maintained that this argument lacks the character of law. The holding
concerning the settlements is reasoned, the sources of law legitimate. The
connection between the settlements and the Barrier is legally vague, but not
outrageous, as there is certainly a factual connection between the two. My
question was never whether the ICJ's work is perfect, but whether it has an
authentically legal character. On that level, I think the ICJ's work on this
point succeeds.
We turn now, as did the ICJ, to the issue of human and humanitarian
rights. 86 The ICJ begins its analysis by listing (depending on how one
counts) eleven legal instruments, together with thirty provisions from those
instruments, that in the court's view apply to the Barrier situation. 87 It then
recounts some facts provided by the human rights rapporteurs on the
hardships caused by the Barrier, and lists the rights therefore violated: that
"private property" not be "confiscated" during occupation; 88 that
"requisitions in kind . . . not be demanded" (except "for the needs of the
army of occupation" and then be recompensed); 89 that "real or personal
property" not -be destroyed ("except where such destruction is rendered
absolutely necessary by military operations"); 90 that "everyone" has the
right to "liberty of movement"; 9 1 and that "everyone" has the right to
85. See infra Part I.C.

86. Humanitarian law and human rights law are ordinarily independent bodies of law,
the first regulating an army's manner of conducting war and treatment of foreign nationals
during war (chiefly via the Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions and Protocols) and
the second regulating a government's treatment of everyone subject to its authority,
including its own citizens (via a variety of other instruments and principles). The ICJ's
decision to apply the two at the same time has sparked some controversy. See, e.g., Michael
J. Dennis, Application of Human Rights Treaties Extraterritoriallyin Times of Armed
Conflict and Military Occupation, 99 AM. J. INT'L L. 119 (2005).
87. Legal Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at 171-89.
88. Hague Convention (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land art. 46,
Oct. 18, 1907, 36 Stat. 2277, 1 Bevans 631 [hereinafter Hague Convention IV]; Legal
Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at 189.
89. Hague Convention IV, supra note 88, art. 52; Legal Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at
189.
90. Geneva Convention IV, supra note 69, art. 53; Legal Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at
189.
91. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights art. 12, Dec. 19, 1966, S. Exec.
Doc. E, 95-2 (1978), 999 U.N.T.S. 171; Legal Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at 189-92.
"work," "the enjoyment of just and favourable conditions of work," "an

adequate standard of living," "the enjoyment of the highest attainable
standard of physical and mental health," and "education." 92 Some of those
provisions contain military qualifications ("except where such destruction is
rendered absolutely necessary," and the like), and the ICJ closes by stating
93
that Israel's security claims with regard to those provisions fail.
I mentioned earlier that error and bad judgment are not the sort of thing
that ordinarily cost a court's opinion the character of law. But while a
court's reasoning can go seriously awry without obviating that character, I
take it that a failure to reason at all would obviate that character-for so
long as our conception of the law has something to do with the exercise of
public reason, 94 and the issue in view is not trivial or obvious, there must be
an answer to the question: "What is the ground of the court's decision?"
"What is the court's argument?" If, for example, a case presented the
question, "May Congress employ the commerce power to establish a
national definition of marriage overriding all contrary state definitions?"
surely there would be a problem from the perspective of law as law with a
one-word opinion stating simply "Yes" or "No." The ICJ's human and
humanitarian rights analysis is not so egregious as that. But I believe it
exhibits an elaborate form of the same '9problem,
5
of a failure to enter the
space of "giving and asking for reasons.
It's not easy to prove an absence. But one can ask the question this way:
the ICJ's discussion of human and humanitarian rights consists basically of
two lists, one with the laws applicable, the other with the laws violated (as a
matter of fact, the two read like lists in prose). 96 What bridges the gap
between those two lists? What is the connective tissue between them? The
answer, with respect to the confiscation, requisition, and destruction of
private property (the humanitarian provisions), is: nothing. The court's
analysis on that point is a single sentence stating without elaboration that
"[f]rom the information submitted.., it appears that the construction of the
92. Convention on the Rights of the Child arts. 24, 27, 28, Nov. 20, 1989, 28 I.L.M
1448; International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights arts. 6-7, 11-14,
Dec. 16, 1966, 993 U.N.T.S. 3; Legal Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at 189-92.' The ICJ also
indicates that the Barrier might violate Palestinians' right of access to holy places. Id. at
188-89.
93. Legal Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at 187, 192-94 (quoting Geneva Convention IV,
supra note 69, art. 53).
94. OWEN FIss, THE LAW AS IT COULD BE, at ix (2003) ("Law is an expression of public
reason ....Judges are instruments of the law and embody that reason."); JOHN RAWLS, The
Idea of Public Reason Revisited, in THE LAW OF PEOPLES 129, 131-34 (1999) ("The idea of
public reason, as I understand it, belongs to a conception of a well-ordered constitutional
democratic society .... [T]he idea of public reason applies more strictly to judges than to
others ....).
95. JURGEN HABERMAS, From Kant to Hegel: On Robert Brandom's Pragmatic
Philosophy of Language, in TRUTH AND JUSTIFICATION 131, 132 (Barbara Fultner ed. &
trans., 2003) ("We are the beings whose essence it is to participate in the practice of 'giving
and asking for reasons."' (quoting ROBERT B. BRANDOM, MAKING IT EXPLICIT: REASONING,
REPRESENTING, AND DISCURSIVE COMMITMENT 5 (1994))).
96. See supra notes 87-93 and accompanying text.
wall has led to the destruction or requisition of properties under conditions

which contravene the requirements of Articles 46 and 52 of the Hague '9 7
Regulations of 1907 and of Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
What are those conditions? Why does the Barrier contravene them? There
is simply silence.
Now, turning to the human rights provisions (freedom of movement, the
right to work, etc.), the court does better. It prefaces its conclusions with
some facts, at least, mentioning access gates with "restricted" opening
hours, "serious repercussions for agricultural production," "difficulties...
regarding access to health services, educational establishments and primary
sources of water," and "businesses . . . shut down." 98 But once these facts
are recounted, the legal conclusion (that the Barrier violates the laundry list
of rights the ICJ says it violates) is simply announced. 99 It is as though the
legal conclusion were just immanent in the facts, such that merely to state
the facts were to prove the conclusion-as if no actual applicationof law to
facts were necessary at all.
A central issue, of course, is how security considerations might
counterbalance these rights. The court takes this issue up only after stating
which rights were violated (which seems odd), and indicates that, absent
some express textual provision to the contrary, the rights in question are
categorical (which seems unsound).10 0 But that aside, we see here again the
essential problem: "[T]he Court is not convinced," we read, "that the
destructions carried out.., were rendered absolutely necessary by military
operations."' 'o0 Fine, but why? What made them unnecessary and what
would have made them necessary? Not a word is said. "[T]he Court ...is
not convinced that the specific course Israel has chosen for the wall was
necessary to attain its security objectives."' 0 2 Again, why? How else might
those objectives have been attained--or were they illegitimate objectives?
Now I have no doubt that considered responses to these questions could be
offered, but the point is that none were offered. In an ordinary legal
opinion, stating the relevant law and facts begins the work, and a
conclusion ends it, but the real action comes in the middle, when law and
facts are interpreted, exegized together until at some point they connect and
give a spark. In the ICJ's opinion, that applicative center is gone; a circle of
legal architecture stands ringed around nothing at all, and the conclusions,
deprived of resultancy, rest only on authority.
The ICJ is not exclusively to blame here. Human rights law often
involves such high degrees of abstraction that it is difficult to know how to
apply it in a legally professional way (although the same cannot be said of

98. Id. at 190-91.
99. Id. at 191-92.
100. Id. at 192-93.
101. Id. at 192.
102. Id. at 193.
2010] SKEPTICAL INTERNA TIONALISM 2479
humanitarian law). 103 Conditions of application, definitions, precedents

from courts, constraining provisions from legislatures-the whole clickety-
clack of legal technique-seem to fall away, until all that's left is a list of
positively valorized abstract nouns, as if one took the Declaration of
Independence's stirring invocation of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness" (rather than the U.S. Constitution's relatively specific
imperatives) and said, "This is law. Now go apply it." If human rights
norms were rights-limiting rather than rights-expanding, we would not
hesitate to regard them as void for vagueness. And perhaps the great,
cloudy sweep of these abstractions is why one observes a certain
carelessness in the way they're handled even by their advocates. In the
Barrier case, for example, it is striking to observe that some of the
provisions on the ICJ's "laws applicable" list disappear without explanation
from the "laws violated" list and then reappear in the "security
qualifications" list, as if the court kept losing track of which of the various
overlapping provisions were in view (and of course, it's not exactly normal
to analyze thirty provisions of law at once). 10 4 If this is law, it is law with
no tightness in the string at all. One can support human rights and human
rights law, and reject rigid forms of relativism and sovereigntism root and
branch, while still finding something absurd in the vague 105 lists of pregnant
abstractions that mark the human rights project at this time.
At this point, finally, fifty-nine pages into its sixty-eight-page opinion,
the ICJ turns to Israel's central claim: that it built the Barrier to defend
itself against terrorism. 10 6 And before even taking up the arguments here, I
would like to point out a problem from the perspective of law as law with
waiting so long to give voice to one side's case. There is of course the issue
of minimization and bias; this sort of delay looks bad, and probably for
good reason. But deeper than that, delay of this sort amounts to skirting the
basic adjudicative problem of the case. At the very heart of the Barrier
case-of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, in fact-is the clash between the
Palestinian claim to territory and the Israeli claim to security.107 Just as the
103. See Curtis A. Bradley & Jack L. Goldsmith, Pinochet and International Human
Rights Litigation, 97 MICH. L. REv. 2129, 2177, 2179 (1999) (remarking on the "profound
uncertainty regarding the actual content of human rights norms," while acknowledging that
human rights law's "aims ... are often desirable" and "hard to disagree with ... in the
abstract").
104. See supra notes 87-93, 100-02 and accompanying text.
105. In making this point, I wish to sound one note of caution: aspirational law expressed
in terms of general principles is more common in Europe than in the United States. There
seems to be a basic division over whether to express the law as principles, leaving it to the
courts to derive rules in the course of application, or to express the law as rules and
mechanisms, leaving it to the courts in application to identify the underlying principles. The
first words of Germany's constitution, for example, are, "Human dignity shall be inviolable."
GRUNDGESETZ [GG] [Constitution] art. 1(1) (F.R.G.). This is considered an intelligible
statement of law. Perhaps, then, the moral abstraction of human rights discourse would not
seem so strange to a European lawyer.
107. See generally THE ISRAEL-ARAB READER, supra note 8; see also Israeli Statement to
ICJ, supra note 10; Palestinian Statement to ICJ, supra note 8.
settlements are the context for the Palestinians' position, so terrorism is the
context for Israel's. Just as the Barrier's route around the settlements is the
best evidence for the Palestinian position, so the Barrier's timing, in the
midst of the Second Intifada, is the best evidence for Israel's. Much of the
complexity of the case comes from these two warring frames of reference,
and a decent opinion on the lawfulness of the Barrier would start with that
clash and take up the particular legal issues in light of it. That is to say, the
structure of an opinion matters to its substance; cases present certain root
adjudicative tasks that courts cannot evade consistently with performing
their office as courts. To defer so much as addressing Israel's position until
after the annexation and human and humanitarian rights analyses were
concluded, in the mode of dispatching one last objection, was to shirk the
business of adjudication itself.
Doctrinally, Israel's position rests in the main on Article 51 of the UN
Charter: "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of
individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a
Member of the United Nations .... 108 The ICJ's response is simple and
important-and not only for the Barrier case: "Article 51 of the Charter," it
writes, "thus recognizes the existence of an inherent right of self-defence in
the case of armed attack by one State against another State. However,
Israel does not claim that the attacks against it are imputable to a foreign
State .... Consequently, the Court concludes that Article 51 of the Charter
has no relevance in this case." 10 9 In other words, there is no right of self-
defense against non-state actors.
This position (which has a history in the ICJ)I 1 0 is profoundly misguided.
It does not make sense textually; Article 51 speaks only of "armed attack"
not "armed attack by a state" (the "thus" in the passage just quoted appears
to be entirely spurious)."' 1 It does not make sense conceptually, since the
root of the right to self-defense is the fact of an attack, not the source of an
attack.11 2 (Could a state immediately threatened by a large private military
force at its borders truly be required to lay supine?) It does not make sense
108. U.N. Charter art. 51.

109. Legal Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at 194 (emphasis added).
110. The ICJ has, in a series of cases both before and after Legal Consequences, staked
out a dramatically limited conception of the Article 51 right of national self-defense. See
Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo (Dem. Rep. Congo v. Uganda), 2005 I.C.J.
168 (Dec. 19); Oil Platforms (Iran v. U.S.), 2003 I.C.J. 161 (Nov. 6); Military and
Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua (Nicar. v. U.S.), 1986 I.C.J. 14 (June 27).
There is a vast body of literature criticizing the ICJ on this point. Thomas Franck is
particularly eloquent: "The consequence of this substantive rule [in the Nicaragua decision]
appears to be that fire may be fought with water, but not with fire." Thomas M. Franck,
Some Observationson the ICJ's Proceduraland Substantive Innovations, 81 AM. J. INT'L L.
116, 120 (1987).
111. See Thomas M. Franck, Editorial Comment, Terrorism and the Right of Self-
Defense, 95 AM. J. INT'L L. 839, 840 (2001) ("[T]he language of Article 51 . . . in
authorizing a victim state to act in self-defense, does not limit this 'inherent' right to attacks
by another state.").
112. See id. ("[T]he right is expressly accorded in response to 'an armed attack' and not
to any particular kind of attacker.").
historically, at least on a long view of history, since state-based political

organization is just one of the ways communities have arranged
themselves-a way some think is fading even now. And it does not make
sense given current international conditions, with the rise of terrorist groups
and other powerful non-state actors. International law no less than
domestic law must outgrow the kind of willful formalism that leads a court
to insist that the right of self-defense just is state-to-state, forever, no matter
what the world is doing in the meantime.
Yet for all that, what we have here is so far only an egregious
misjudgment, and I would not say it lacks the character of law but for two
further factors.
First is internal inconsistency. Throughout this analysis, we have treated
the occupied territory as a quasi-state and afforded it the legal incidents of
statehood. Without that premise, it would make no sense to think of the
occupied territory as occupied, as belonging in any legal sense to the
Palestinian people (a state cannot occupy itself), and no sense to ask
whether the Barrier annexes it (a state cannot annex itself). But if Palestine
is a state for purposes of annexation, it must also be a state for purposes of
armed attack. A court cannot say to defendant John Doe, "You owe the
plaintiff damages, because the contract is valid," and to plaintiff Richard
Roe, "You do not owe goods, because the contract is invalid," with the
minimum of good faith and logic necessary for law to be law.
Second are two Security Council resolutions passed at the urging of the
113
United States in the immediate aftermath of September 11th.
Resolutions 1368 and 1373 both contain the verbal formula-the
identification of "threats to international peace and security"--that puts the
Security Council's lawmaking authority under the Charter system at its
highest pitch;"1 4 Resolution 1373 in particular invokes the part of the
Charter, Chapter 7, that endows the Security Council with the authority to
act in a fully imperative, legislative mode even for nonconsenting member
states.'15 The resolutions, in other words, are as much like binding
legislation as international law gets, and certainly constitute law for the
international court. Having thus taken the mantle of lawmaking authority,
the Council in both resolutions recognizes that the actions of nonstate
terrorist organizations trigger "the inherent right of individual or collective
self-defence as recognized by the Charter." 116 How is it then that the ICJ
could pronounce something exactly contrary in stating that the right of self-
113. S.C. Res. 1373, U.N. Doc. S/RES/1373 (Sept. 28, 2001); S.C. Res. 1368, U.N. Doc.
S/RES/1368 (Sept. 12, 2001),
114. S.C. Res. 1373, supra note 113, 5; S.C. Res. 1368, supra note 113, 1.
115. S.C. Res. 1373, supra note 113, 10 (stating that the Security Council is herein
"[a]cting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations" and issuing decisions as to
what "all States shall" do (emphasis added)).
116. Id. 4; see also S.C. Res. 1368, supra note 113, 3. Franck too notes the
distinctive, Chapter VII authority connected to Resolutions 1368 and 1373, and also argues
that they dictate-indeed, that "[i]t is inconceivable" that they would not dictate-an Article
51 right of self-defense against nonstate actors. Franck, supra note 111, at 840.
2482 FORDHAMLAWREVIEW [Vol. 78
defense applies only between states? There's really no answer to that

question. The ICJ mentions the resolutions, but says that since "the threat
which [Israel] regards as justifying the construction of the wall originates
within" the occupied territory, where Israel "exercises control," the
situation is "different from that contemplated by Security Council
resolutions 1368 (2001) and 1373 (2001)."11 7 But even if true (which is
doubtful), that response does nothing to address the contradiction between
the ICJ's view of Article 51 and the Security Council's ruling on it.
The jurisprudential point here is one Lon Fuller made in his now famous
debate with H. L. A. Hart. Fuller was advancing the position that certain
types of irrational or morally unsupportable conduct that purport to be law
cannot be law properly so called. 118 Many of his arguments concerned acts
of a legislative or executive character (such as the famous inconsistent
monarch), but he also spoke quite passionately to the work of courts, and
gave a real-life example: there was a German soldier in the Nazi era, Fuller
wrote, who told his wife in their home that he wished the attempt to
assassinate Hitler had succeeded, and who, after she turned him in, was
prosecuted under statutes requiring death or imprisonment for anyone who
"publicly seeks to injure or destroy the will of the German people," or
"publicly makes spiteful or provocative statements directed against ... the
leading personalities of the [German] nation" or who makes such remarks
privately but "realized or should have realized they would reach the
public."1 19 These are odious statutes, but their moral failings are a
legislative issue, and not Fuller's point. His concern was the way in which
the courts applied the statutes, and, after noting a variety of manipulations
in this regard, what for him passed all bounds from the perspective of law
as law was the court's treatment of the word "publicly." With respect to the
first statute, the limitation was "generally disregarded." 120 With respect to
the second, the court declared that the wife's act of informing on her
husband made his remarks public-in which case, Fuller pointed out, "there
is no such thing as a private utterance under this statute." 121 Fuller
concludes, "When a system calling itself law is predicated upon a general
disregard by judges of the terms of the laws they purport to enforce ...it is
not hard for me, at least, to deny to it the name of law." 122

Territory, Advisory Opinion, 2004 I.C.J. 136, 194 (July 9).
118. Law properly so called-or what I will later term "law's self-constituting values"-
was, in my view, the subject of the Hart/Fuller debate. See infra notes 229-38 and
accompanying text.
119. Lon L. Fuller, Positivism and Fidelity to Law-A Reply to ProfessorHart, 71 HARV.
L. REv. 630, 653-54 (1958) (translating Law of Aug. 17, 1938, RGB1. 11 1939 at 1456; Law
of Dec. 20, 1934, RGB1. I at 1269).
120. Id. at 654.
121. Id. at 655.
122. Id. at 660. Note the phrase, "calling itself law"--strongly but apparently
unintentionally reminiscent of John Austin's phrase, "law properly so called." AUSTIN, supra
note 1, at 10.
A "general disregard of the terms of the laws they purport to enforce"

describes exactly, sadly, the ICJ's handling of the right of self-defense, and
Fuller's conclusion-which is really in equal measure about the logic of an
analysis and about the right way for lawyers to respond to egregious
transgressions within their community-applies equally here.
B. The Israeli High Court of Justice in the BarrierCase

Let's begin this section as we did the last: by asking whether the Barrier
litigation's institutional setting was imbalanced, and what it means for law
as law if so. The run-up to the case was certainly less partisan in Israel than
it had been in the ICJ. The injured Palestinians sued; the court seemed
more to be looking over the executive's shoulder than to be acting in
concert with other branches of government to legitimate a common cause.
And the tone of the court's opinion was more balanced than the ICJ's. But
a closer look complicates the picture, for balanced or not in tone, one
cannot read the Israeli court's opinion without knowing past all doubt that
the court is Israeli-that its judges are identifying members of Israeli
society, alarmed and angry at Palestinian violence and united in certain
assumptions about the things to which their country is entitled and to which
the Palestinians are not entitled. Actually, watching the court in action as it
interacts with the Israeli military and other segments of Israeli society in the
case, one gets the distinct feeling of overhearing a conversation among
Israel's small elite about how to handle the Palestinian issue-with some
voices more stem and others less so, but all using an Israeli "we" and123a
Palestinian "they." "We are members of Israeli society," Barak writes.
"Although we are sometimes in an ivory tower, that tower is in the heart of
124
Jerusalem, which is not infrequently hit by ruthless terror."'
How should a Palestinian living in the West Bank feel about those
words? I don't mean the question rhetorically: what is a reasonable stance
toward a litigation setting that is of one of the two sides-either for a person
who is of the other side or for a person who aspires to shed his identity
enough to want most that law be law? My answer here is a version of the
one I gave before with the ICJ: that there are serious problems of neutrality
in real courts everywhere, and certainly in the international legal system we
now occupy; that these problems run far deeper than we pretend, with
forces more powerful than most anything else in the social world, forces of
identity, ideology, and passion, beating on the law's door; but that we
should nonetheless be satisfied, and any sense of offense assuaged, if the
question asked is answered in accord with legal principles. 125 If the
question is also answered correctly, we should be quite satisfied indeed.
123. HCJ 2056/04 Beit Sourik Vill. Council v. Gov't of lsr. [2004] IsrSC 58(5) 807, 861,
translatedin 43 I.L.M. 1099, 1128 (2004).
124. Id.
125. See supra pp. 2456-57, 2463-64.
1. Principles of Legality and Finding Facts

The Israeli High Court's fact-finding was, in my view, the pinnacle of the
court's work in the Barrier case. 126 To begin with, the factual process was
quite rigorous. It was multiply adversary, involving not only the West
Bank petitioners and military defendants but also, importantly, the "Council
for Peace and Security"--a society of Israeli reserve officers whose amicus
briefs and affidavits argued that many of the changes sought by the
Palestinian litigants would also make the Barrier more effective from a
security point of view. 12 7 The court held seven factually intensive hearings
over the course of three or four months, and also received a great variety of
documentary evidence, including, at the court's request, detailed relief
models and aerial photographs showing the Barrier's route and possible
alternative routes. 128 (I remember vividly walking into Barak's chambers
on my first day of work and looking with astonishment at all the maps and
models.) The court also received statements from officers and workers who
handled the details of the Barrier's construction.
A natural effect of this sort of process was a certain factual particularity
in the court's reasoning. What was challenged in the case in Israel,
litigiously speaking, was not the Barrier as a general policy but eight orders
from the Israeli military for land seizures necessary to the Barrier's
construction. 129 The court took up those orders one at a time, and much of
its fact-finding and legal reasoning was done, not at the outset and about the
Barrier as a whole, but about the particular conditions connected to each
order-about this particular stretch where the Barrier shoots into Palestinian
land to seize a useful hill, or that stretch where the Barrier comes right up
next to some Palestinian homes, etc. 130 The particularity makes it difficult
to generalize about the Israeli court's findings. Nonetheless, three basic
factual positions come out clearly enough and are indispensable to
understanding the case.
First, the court found that the Barrier's purpose was to protect Israeli
security rather than "to draw a political border."' 131 Indeed, after the court
sets out its legal position-that only security considerations may lawfully
motivate either the decision to construct the Barrier or the decision as to its
route; that no desire to redraw the border between Israel and Palestine may
be part of the mix-the annexation issue is treated almost entirely as an
issue of fact. And what facts were they that moved the court? That the
126. When Israel's Supreme Court sits as the High Court of Justice, it reviews
administrative action directly and engages in fact-finding directly; there is no trial court.
Also, like courts in the continental legal tradition, the Israeli court is an active participant in
gathering facts rather than only an umpire of the parties' fact gathering.
127. Beit Sourik, IsrSC 58(5) at 823-25, translated in 43 I.L.M. at 1105-06. Amici
participation is unusual in the Israeli High Court, but it was important in the Barrier case.
128. Id. at 823-27, translatedin 43 I.L.M. at 1105-07.
131. Id. at 829, translatedin 43 I.L.M. at 1108.
military commander could justify the Barrier's route in detail on the basis
of security considerations alone; that no evidence was given to doubt his
claim of a non-annexationist purpose; that the petitioners' Green Line
argument ("if the fence was primarily motivated by security considerations,
it would be constructed on the 'Green Line"') could not be right because "it
is the security perspective-and not the political one-which must examine
the route ... without regard for the location of the Green Line"; and that the
Council for Peace and Security, despite opposing the Barrier's route, never
suggested the route was motivated by annexation and never recommended
following the Green Line. 132 The first of those reasons, I suspect, was the
key. When the court scrutinized the Barrier's justification, piece by piece,
step by step along the forty kilometers challenged in the case, two
considerations kept coming up: topographical control and the need for a
"security zone" between the Barrier and nearby Jewish areas (thus allowing
response time should the Barrier be infiltrated). The court, as we will see,
did not approve giving these considerations as much priority as the
policymakers gave them, but it regarded them as "security considerations
133
par excellence."
Second, the court found that the Barrier imposed grave burdens on the
individual Palestinians and communities of Palestinians it touched. A good
example, albeit one featuring the Barrier at its most severe, is the court's
discussion of the village that gave the case its name, the village of Beit
Sourik:
500 dunams [0.5 square kilometers] of the lands of the village of Beit
Sourik will be directly damaged by the positioning of the obstacle. 6000
additional dunams [6 square kilometers] will remain beyond it (5000
dunams of which are cultivated land), including three greenhouses. Ten
thousand trees will be uprooted and the inhabitants of the villages will be
cut off from 25,000 ... olive trees, 25,000 fruit
134
trees and 5400 fig trees,
as well as from many other agricultural crops.
The court insists on a broad understanding of this injury:
These numbers do not capture the severity of the damage. We must take
into consideration the total consequences of the obstacle for the way of
life in this area. The original route as determined in the order leaves the
village of Beit Sourik bordered tightly by the obstacle on its west, south,
and east sides.
1 35
This is a veritable chokehold, which will severely stifle
daily life.
Third, throughout the opinion is a sense of the harm done by Palestinian
terrorism, a sense that takes voice in the court's opening lament: "[A] short
time after the failure of the Camp David talks, the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict reached new heights of violence." 136 In September 2000, "the

135. Id.
Palestinian side began a campaign of terror," which, by April 2004,

included 780 attacks within Israel ("against citizens and soldiers, men and
women, elderly and infants, regular citizens and public figures"), 8200
attacks in the West Bank, 900 Israeli dead, and 6000 Israeli injured ("some
with serious wounds that have left them severely handicapped"). 137 There
are "many dead and wounded on the Palestinian side as well. Bereavement
13 8
and pain wash over us."
From the standpoint of law properly so called, I can find nothing to fault
and much to praise here. The material claims of fact were heard,
scrutinized with care and in light of evidence, and adjudicated on the basis
of articulated reasons. As to the Barrier's purpose, the conclusion may or
may not be right-there's no way finally to know whether someone
involved in authorizing the Barrier had annexation in mind-but it is
certainly grounded, and substantiated enough that I think we should regard
it as probable, though by no means certain. And as to the injuries in view
on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides, the court displays both honesty and
nuance-an important matter, because an obtuse view of the nature of the
harm in stating the facts can easily distort the evaluation of the harm in
applying the law. Part of the reason adjudication is an empathic and not
merely an intellectual activity is that a court must understand what is at
stake in a case to judge it well, and that understanding comes across,
typically, in the description and characterization of facts. 139 Here, on the
Israeli side, terrorism seems terrifying and abhorrent, as it should. On the
Palestinian side, the court recognizes that what is at stake is not just
property and convenience (which can be compensated and managed, and
might seem trivial when weighed against Israeli lives) but something
larger-that the sedimentary accumulation of individually minor injuries
can collectively undermine a way of life. Finally, by setting up the facts in
this way, the court engages without evasion in what I earlier called the "root
adjudicative task" of the Barrier case, addressing itself right from the start
to the clash between the Israeli claim to security and the Palestinian claim
to territory and rights. 140 We have here an instance of international law in
action that fully deserves the appellation "law."
2. Principles of Legality and Applying Law
The picture is darker when we turn to the Israeli court's legal analysis.
And here, I would like to drop the practice (conceit, really) of speaking of
137. Id. at 814-15, translatedin 43 I.L.M. at 1099.

139. It's a little unclear when one crosses the line from taking note of bare facts about the
world (e.g., "25,000 . . . olive trees, 25,000 fruit trees," id. at 855, translatedin 43 I.L.M. at
1124) to characterizing those facts in a way that comes closer to applying law (e.g., "which
will severely stifle daily life," id.). But I take it that both are part of the enterprise of
description, of getting a good picture of the world inside the law, and so both fall generally
under the category of fact.
the Israeli "court," for the Barrier opinion, although the product of a three-
justice panel, was less the work of a committee than the work of an
individual-Aharon Barak-and my chief criticism of the opinion is that it
bears the mark of his subjectivity too much.
Barak is a world-historic figure in law in our time; that more American
lawyers don't know of him testifies to an unfortunate provincialism in our
field. Chief justice from 1995 through 2006, Barak is like John Marshall in
that he created the institution of judicial review in Israel (and like John
Marshall in that the move was not obviously authorized). 141 He is like Earl
Warren in that he led a rights revolution based on a powerful and proactive
judiciary.' 42 And he is like Richard Posner in that he has been
preternaturally prolific as a scholar both before and while being a judge,
filling shelves with books and articles that touch almost every field of
Israeli law. 143 His defenders say he is brilliant, and that he has done more
than any other person in Israel to protect justice and individual rights
against the pressures of violent conflict with the Palestinians and the
religious conservatism of Israel's powerful orthodox community. 144 His
critics say he is very bright, but only appears brilliant, and blind to his own
limitations has made Israel's judiciary a society of philosopher-kings who
mistake their own Left-liberal politics for justice and impose them against
the will of a democratic people. 145 We know this debate from our own
country, and it's not necessary to get into it here, except to say that Barak
was quite powerful for a long time-attorney general from 1975 to 1978,
then associate justice on the Supreme Court until 1995, then chief-and in
my view he became comfortable with the authority of his own sense of law
and justice.
Barak's legal analysis has two parts: one concerned with annexation
(whether the military commander has, in Barak's framework, the "authority
to construct the fence" in the West Bank at all), and the other with
humanitarian rights (whether the "route chosen for construction of the
separation fence" within the West Bank imposes too heavily on the local
141. See generally Hillel Neuer, Aharon Barak's Revolution, AZURE (Isr.), Winter
5758/1998, at 13.
142. Id.
143. His work in English or translated to English while serving as a justice includes, in
addition to various articles, three books: AHARON BARAK, JUDICIAL DISCRETION (Yadin
Kaufnann trans., 1989); AHARON BARAK, PURPOSIVE INTERPRETATION IN LAW (Sari Bashi
trans., 2005); AHARON BARAK, THE JUDGE INA DEMOCRACY (2006) [hereinafter BARAK, THE
JUDGE INA DEMOCRACY]. Most of his scholarship is only in Hebrew.
144. See, e.g., Owen Fiss, Law Is Everywhere, 117 YALE L.J. 256 (2007) (an article-
length, self-styled "tribute" to Barak).
145. See, e.g., ROBERT BORK, COERCING VIRTUE: THE WORLDWIDE RULE OF JUDGES 111-
34 (2003) (censuring Barak as the world's most extreme judicial activist). Richard Posner's
view is more measured and more sensitive to the differences between the Israeli and U.S.
political situations than Bork's, but it comes to the same place. See Richard A. Posner,
EnlightenedDespot, NEW REPUBLIC, Apr. 23, 2007, at 53-56 (reviewing BARAK, THE JUDGE
INA DEMOCRACY, supra note 143).
population). 146 The first goes by fast-about three pages devoted, as we've
seen, almost entirely to facts. Because of its factual rigor, I do not think
this brief treatment of the annexation issue can be denied the status of law.
But it is a little light. For one thing, Barak assumes that a purpose-based
test of annexation is appropriate; he never takes up other possibilities. He
also never considers the relationship between the Barrier and the
settlements-which is not to say that he assumes the settlements to be legal
(quite the opposite), 147 but that he assumes their legality to be a separate
question from the Barrier's. Even if one agrees with that, as I do, it ought
not to be an assumption. Now, it seems the plaintiffs in Beit Sourik,
perhaps for strategic reasons, did not themselves focus on the annexation
issue; Barak explains that, as the issue "did not receive full expression in
the arguments before us ... we too shall occupy ourselves [only] briefly"
with it. 14 8 It must also be said that Barak seems to have had no fear of the
issue; in the later, Mara'abe case on the Barrier, he discussed the
annexation question and the connection between the settlements and the
Barrier directly and at length (and again held the Barrier to be grounded in
security concerns). 149 Given this litigation context and larger context, and
again the factual rigor, it seems plain that the annexation analysis in Beit
Sourik should be considered sufficient from the standpoint of law as law, if
not wholly satisfying as an argument.
The remainder of the opinion is taken up with the derivation and
application of the principle of proportionality. By "derivation" I mean that
Barak went to some effort to justify selecting the principle of
proportionality as the legal principle at issue-it did not come naturally
from the facts and claims. "The general point of departure of all parties,"
he begins, "is that Israel holds the area in belligerent occupation."' 150 That
takes us to the 1907 Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention,
but rather than examine those two instruments' specific provisions, Barak
argues that all humanitarian law's specific provisions "revolve around two
central axes" 15 '-security, on the one hand, and liberty on the other-
between which "a proper balance must be found."' 152 We have thus
transitioned from an analysis of concrete textual provisions of law to a
balancing cast in the most general possible terms. But we're not done yet:
146. HCJ 2056/04 Beit Sourik Viii. Council v. Gov't of Isr. [2004] IsrSC 58(5) 807, 828,
832, translated in 43 I.L.M. 1099, 1108, 1110 (2004).
147. Id. at 829, translated in 43 I.L.M. at 1108 ("[T]his Court [has] discussed whether it
is possible to seize land in order to build a Jewish civilian town, when the purpose of the
building of the town is not the security needs and defense of the area ... but rather based
upon a Zionist perspective of settling the entire land of Israel. This question was answered
by this Court in the negative.").
148. Id. at 828, translated in 43 I.L.M. at 1108.
149. HCJ 7957/04 Mara'abe v. The Prime Minister of Isr. [2005], translated in 45 I.L.M.
202, 238-40 (2006); see also supra note 65.
150. Beit Sourik, IsrSC 58(5) at 827, translated in 43 I.L.M. at 1107.
151. Id. at 833, translated in 43 I.L.M. at 1111 (citation omitted) (internal quotation
marks omitted).
152. Id. at 836, translated in 43 I.L.M. at 1112.
Barak's next move is to posit proportionality as the universal principle of

any such balancing. "The problem of balancing between security and
liberty," he writes, "is not specific to the discretion of a military
commander of an area under belligerent occupation."' 153 No, it is "a general
problem in the law," whose "solution is universal . . . found deep in the
general principles of law."' 154 What is that solution? "One of those
foundational principles which balance between the legitimate objective and
the means of achieving it is the principle of proportionality."' 55 Barak goes
on to cite various scholars who recognize proportionality to be "a general
principle of international law"; various cases recognizing it to be "a general
principle of Israeli administrative law"; and a series of cases (mostly his
own) applying the principle to Israeli military action in the occupied
156
territory.
Having thus derived the principle, it remains to apply it, and Barak does
this step by step along the Barrier's route, taking up each of the eight
seizure orders in turn. The analysis is complicated because the principle of
proportionality has three subtests, but consistently the reasoning has this
shape: Barak holds the challenged portion of the Barrier to be a "rational
means" for realizing Israel's security objective (the first subtest); he holds it
to be the "least injurious" means available for achieving that objective, in
that "there is no alternate route that fulfills, to a similar extent, the security
needs while causing lesser injury to the local inhabitants" (the second
subtest); but then he holds it not to be a "proportionate means" for
achieving that objective, in that the marginal cost to Israel of moving the
Barrier away from Palestinian population centers is fairly small, while the
marginal benefit of doing so for the local population is fairly great (the third
subtest). 157 Barak holds, in other words, that the Barrier's route was
rationally designed to protect Israeli life, that any change in its route would
increase the risk to Israeli life, but-and the drama of this should not be
overlooked-that the route must be changed anyway. We are at the
marginal limit, but that doesn't matter: we must sacrifice some small
degree of increased risk to Israelis for the sake of a large degree of
increased liberty for Palestinians. To take again the village of Beit Sourik
as an example, the harm done to the local population "is most severe....
Their way of life is completely undermined." And while there is some
"security advantage achieved by the route," it is "in no way proportionate to
the additional injury to the lives of the local inhabitants. '158 Therefore the

154. Id.
156. Id. at 827-28, 833-39, translated in 43 I.L.M. at 1107-08, 1111-14 (citations
omitted) (internal quotation marks omitted). Note that administrative law in Israel is
understood less as a body of regulation for administrative agencies than as a form of law
regulating the executive generally, and thus governing the military. Israeli military action
abroad is therefore doubly governed by international and administrative law.
157. Id. at 839-41, 849-50, translatedin 43 I.L.M. at 1114-16, 1120-21.
158. Id. at 856, translatedin 43 I.L.M. at 1124-25.
2490 4 FORDHAM LAW REVIEW [Vol. 78
military commander "must create an arrangement which will avoid this

severe injury to the local 159
inhabitants, even at the cost of a certain reduction
of the security demands."
It's striking how different Barak's and the ICJ's overall portraits of the
Barrier's construction end up being. With the ICJ, the picture showed an
Israeli executive bent on surreptitious annexation, all shadows and false
denials and smoke-filled rooms. With Barak, the picture is exactly
reversed: we have a military commander so single-minded about Israeli
security that nothing else (the Green Line, Palestinian local life, even
annexation) really registers, someone who, while never malicious or
irrational toward Palestinians, would always treat Israeli security as the
trump card when put to the choice. Barak's message to him was: Israeli
security is not always the most important thing; reroute the Barrier so that
losses and gains are more evenly balanced. Barak does not dictate the new
route (that "is the military commander's affair"160 ), but he vetoes the route
originally chosen and dictates the principle to govern a new one.
How should we regard this reasoning from the perspective of law
properly so called? I take from it the sense of encountering, not law of an
impersonal sort, but a man-a man with a sense of justice, but just a man.
When Barak derived the principle of proportionality from the general
foundations of all law, he was simply making a choice about what law to
avail himself of. The principle didn't come to him, carried along by the
facts and claims, compelled by the Hague Regulations and Geneva
Conventions. Barak squeezed the Regulations and Conventions until he
had wrung from them their most general idea, and then set them aside,
applying their general idea in place of their actual provisions. And of
course, the principle of proportionality itself is a permissive thing, one that
put Barak's discretion at an apex and seems to have attracted him because it
put his discretion at an apex. 16 1 Balancing is the leitmotif of Barak's
jurisprudence, and surely balancing is, although always a little analytically
unsatisfying, far too common in the law to be considered a major failing.
But usually the balancing is unavoidable: in American constitutional
jurisprudence, for example, the typical structure is that a plaintiff claims his
rights were violated, the government admits burdening the rights but argues
that it had good and legally sufficient reasons for doing so, and there seems

160. Id.
161. See Alec Stone Sweet & Jud Mathews, Proportionality Balancing and Global
Constitutionalism,47 COLUM.J. TRANSNAT'L L. 72, 72, 87, 136, 160-61 (2008) (arguing that
proportionality analysis has emerged as "a dominant technique of rights adjudication" in
courts throughout the world; that as a type of analysis it is "inescapably an exercise in
applied constitutional (or international) lawmaking" requiring judges to reason and behave
"as legislators do"; that "in every system examined ...a court's turn toward [proportionality
analysis] generated processes that served to enhance, radically, the judiciary's role in both
lawmaking and constitutional development"; and that Barak's Beit Sourik decision was an
"unprecedented" instance of the technique at work).
nothing for it but to balance. 162 Here Barak chose the analytical structure
that would give him the freedom to balance, and one has the sense that he
chose it because it would give him the freedom to balance. There is a
chosenness to it all.
That is a complaint about the selection of the principle of proportionality.
But a second complaint is that, in applying the principle of proportionality,
no strict elements of law were in view to constrain the free play of Barak's
sense of what was right or best. 16 3 In this respect, Beit Sourik has the same
flavor as certain, particularly strained constitutional cases in the United
States. 164 Once the most open-ended forms of balancing are set into
motion, the sense of law as an enterprise in systematic interpretation,
aspiring to objectivity, seems to fall away; law becomes judges-their
beliefs and attitudes and sentiments-and we encounter unveiled the bare
fact of their authority over us, which becomes in turn the law again and the
scope and limits of our rights. I think it is discomfort with that bare fact of
ruling and being ruled that spurs the effort to constrain the balancing at least
a little, classifying the right in view as fundamental or not, the type of
scrutiny as strict or not, etc. (though one wonders whether and to what
extent these categories are window-dressing). But in Beit Sourik, the
balancing isn't even putatively constrained. Barak simply took a look for
himself at the liberty/security balance chosen for the Barrier and said in
effect, "This is not good enough." I happen to agree that it was not good
enough, but I cannot see how Barak's saying so could be thought an
observer-independent result derived from something other than one
particular judge's values.
I want to be careful not to overstate this point. There is much to admire
in the decision and in the judge who made it. Nor do I think it dramatically
lacking from the standpoint of law properly so called. The facts are truly
impressive, and even the handling of proportionality is, if too subjective,
not out in left field. But I never meant to imply that the law/non-law
distinction is a digital, either/or distinction. A judicial decision can pass by
degrees from law into non-law as any of a family of characteristics
associated with law as law-none sufficient for the classification and
perhaps none strictly necessary either-fall away, the threads of the
juridical cut one by one.1 6 5 In Barak's work, one very important thread, the
objectivity thread, has been cut. The purpose of the next section is to see if
162. See, e.g., Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985) (balancing to decide whether,
under the Fourth Amendment, police may use deadly force to apprehend a fleeing suspect);
Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951) (balancing to decide whether, under the First
Amendment, Congress may criminalize speech that aims at violent revolution). But see T.
Alexander Aleinikoff, ConstitutionalLaw in the Age of Balancing, 96 YALE L.J. 943, 995,
1004 (1987) (arguing that balancing is not "inevitable" or "inescapable" and has "turned us
away from the Constitution").
163. See Sweet & Matthews, supra note 161, at 72, 87, 136, 160-61.
164. I develop this comparison in the discussion of objectivity below. See infra Part II.C.
165. I develop this theoretical idea in the opening to Part II below. See infra text
accompanying notes 198-203.
international law has the resources to resew that thread, to reach generally
the same conclusion about the Barrier-the conclusion is, I think, generally
correct-but by means that are more analytically sound.
C. The Possibilityof Law in the BarrierCase

I'd like now to propose a new analysis of the Barrier, one that is more
faithful to the adjudicative enterprise than the ICJ's and more objective than
Barak's. It is a doctrinal analysis, but the ultimate question in view is still
jurisprudential-still whether international law in the Barrier case is (or
rather, could be) law properly so called. For after one court's utter failure
and another's partially unsatisfactory attempt, the lingering question is
whether international law has the doctrinal resources to address the question
of the Barrier in a sensible and reasonably objective way. One could
imagine a body of law that is simply not up to the challenge of a really
tough case-that runs dry, or offers only vague generalities (and therefore
vast discretion), or (and I think this is a particular suspicion with
international law) insists on such stupid, dangerous outcomes that
policymakers are relieved when the judgment proves unenforceable. What
I intend to show here is that, in the Barrier case, an analysis that comports
with principles of legality was available and was sound.
1. The Opening Position

My starting point is that the Israeli/Palestinian situation of which the
Barrier is a part is international in nature. A corollary is that the Palestinian
territory east of the Green Line is tantamount to a state for purposes of legal
analysis. I recognize that there is a certain temptation to "fudge" this
assumption, to avoid a major controversy by means of some strategic
vagueness. But without making some sort of commitment on this issue at
the outset, no legal analysis can begin. If the territory is Israel's,
international law simply does not apply (except for that part of international
law-human rights law-concerned with a state's treatment of its own);
there can be no question of annexation (a state cannot annex itself) and no
law of occupation (a state cannot occupy itself). 166 If the territory is not
Israel's, international law does apply, and we enter the world we have in
fact occupied for the last forty pages or so. In other words, we commit
ourselves to a position on "Palestine" by the questions we ask and the law
we use, whether we admit it or not, and on that level both the ICJ and
Israeli High Court took out a position-just the one I've voiced-in the
very structure of their analyses. And it is a reasonable position. The
Palestinian West Bank, together with the Gaza Strip, has a different national
identity than Israel, as everyone involved has recognized. Israeli and
Palestinian leadership, together with influential third parties like the EU, the
United States, and the Security Council, have committed themselves to a

"two-state solution." 16 7 Security Council Resolutions have effectively

stated that ultimate Palestinian sovereignty in the occupied territory is a
matter of legal right; Israeli Supreme Court opinions have skirted very close
to doing the same. 168 And finally, the only alternative is an Israeli
dominance that only a few of the more radical voices in Israel and the
United States believe tenable. Now, as a state in waiting, Palestine's
borders are disputed (perhaps most of all with regard to East Jerusalem); it
is more clear that there should be a Palestine than that the Green Line
should mark its extent. But with no other option available, and the acute
legal and practical need for some sort of line, I think there is no alternative
than to treat the Green Line as the presumptive border for purposes of
analysis in the Barrier case.
A consequence of the situation's international character is that the
settlements are illegal. The Fourth Geneva Convention's text is clear: "The
Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian
population into the territory it occupies." 169 And even if that text were
unclear, or if Israel were to prevail on the question of its application, the
provision does no more than specify a rule already implicit in the principle
of non-annexation, 170 for moving civilian communities into occupied
territory just is a method of annexing territory-which is why the Fourth
Geneva Convention forbids it. In other words, so long as the territory east
of the Green Line is Palestinian, there is no sense in which a legal regime
based on non-annexation could permit the settlements. In my view, any
adequate adjudication of the Barrier case must acknowledge the
settlements' illegality and address any connection between the Barrier and
them.
A second consequence of the situation's international character, however,
is that the Palestinian violence involved in the Second Intifada triggers
Israel's right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. That the
violence constitutes a form of illegal terrorism is beyond doubt; one cannot
target civilians with bombs and claim to be engaged in lawful resistance.
And if the bare logic of self-defense in the world today did not make it clear
that terrorism on such a scale can trigger Article 51, and if the Security
Council's two terrorism resolutions still left some room for doubt, still our
167. See, e.g., A Performance-Based Road Map to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Letter Dated 7 May 2003 from the Secretary-General Addressed
to the President of the Security Council, annex at 1-2, U.N. Doc. S/2003/529 (May 7, 2003)
(proposing a "two state solution" based on Palestine ending "violence and terrorism" and
Israel ending "settlement activity"). This proposal was endorsed by the Security Council in
Resolution 1515. S.C. Res. 1515, U.N. Doc. S/RES/1515 (Nov. 19, 2003).
168. See supra notes 81, 147, 150 and accompanying text (bearing in mind that to apply
the law of occupation is to hold that sovereignty belongs to the occupied, discussed supra
notes 69-70 and accompanying text).
169. Geneva Convention IV, supra note 69, art. 49, para. 6. The question is not whether
we as lawyers can find something indeterminate in even a statement like that. Language
being what it is, of course we can. The question is whether it is a credit or a discredit to the
profession when we do.
170. See supra notes 68-70, 81 and accompanying text.
opening premise was that the situation is international, which means that
Palestinian violence is international violence-the very subject of Article
51.171 In other words, there are two underlying illegalities here, the
settlements and terrorism. The Barrier is linked to both-a fact from which
much of the case's complexity comes-and I take it that any adequate
adjudication of the case must deal frankly with the pair.
It follows-and if you hear a "therefore" here, you're right, for I think
there's a certain logical necessity to this-that the Palestinian/Israeli
situation at the time of the Second Intifada constituted a state of
international armed conflict, or what international law used to call simply
"war." How could it be otherwise legally, when there is a level of violent
conflict between two states sufficient to trigger the right of self-defense?
And how could it be otherwise humanly, when approximately 9000
Palestinian attacks kill over 900 Israelis (and injure more than 6000) and
Israeli counterattacks kill almost 5000 Palestinians? 172 When I was
working on the Barrier case, I vividly recall one Israeli friend exclaiming,
"How could anyone think we are not at war when bombs are exploding
every week in cafes in Tel Aviv?" A Palestinian could easily add, "How
could anyone think we are not at war when Israeli missiles are rocketing
into Palestinian apartment buildings in Gaza?" If we look at the facts of
large-scale, organized violence, of blow and counterblow and a rising death
toll, we cannot but call this war-or, again to be more technical,
international armed conflict.
Identifying the Barrier's context as one of international armed conflict is
important. The choice between war and peace is a delta point in
international law. Consequences flow from that choice.
2. Annexation
A state on the defensive side of international armed conflict acquires the
right to take-not to annex, but as a military measure to take-the
aggressor's territory as part of the process of winning a lawful war. 17 3 The
war context is why Israel building the Barrier within the West Bank is not
like, say, the United States responding to illegal immigration by building a
barrier within Mexico-why a lawyer for the Palestinian cause could not
insist that Israel simply must stay on its side of the Green Line, full stop.
The proper response to such an argument is that there are consequences to
waging aggressive war; Israel was prima facie entitled to take control of

172. See HCJ 2056/04 Beit Sourik Viii. Council v. Gov't of Isr. [2004] IsrSC 58(5) 807,
815, translated in 43 I.L.M. 1099, 1099-100 (2004) (listing the number of Palestinian
attacks, Israeli deaths, and Israeli injuries between September 2000 and April 2004);
B'Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories,
Fatalities, http://www.btselem.org/english/Statistics/Casualties.asp (last visited Mar. 15,
2010) (listing the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed between September 2000 and
December 2008).
Palestinian territory as part of its war effort. A lawyer for the Palestinian
cause would have to shift his or her argument, contending not that
Palestinian territory is inviolable, but that the Barrier's incursion should be
understood as a form of annexation rather than as part of the war effort.
And that brings us to the difficult question at the heart of the Barrier case:
how do we tell the difference?
I am not aware of any existing legal test for identifying an annexation
where the matter is unclear and in dispute. The Israeli High Court assumed
a motive-based test.1 74 The ICJ assumed an effects-based test (though it
probably used a motive-based test in the end, inferring the Barrier's motive
from the settlements). 175 But neither court cited grounds for its choice, or
even seemed to recognize that it had made a choice, and the two tests are so
speculative-the one requiring an inquiry into a government's corporate
mens rea, the other a prediction about what the future will bring-as to be
impossible to administer convincingly, which is a problem when courts are
called on to resolve something as explosive as a border dispute. What's
more, even if we could know, past all controversy, that a state lawfully
engaged in defensive war took actions motivated by annexationist desires or
certain to have an annexationist effect, we would have in my view
insufficient reason to prohibit the conduct. Imagine that, just before D-Day,
we had a recording of President Roosevelt telling General Eisenhower:
"This is perfect. We invade, oust Hitler, and make Germany the forty-ninth
state." Would the invasion therefore be illegal? No, because it would still
be necessary to winning a legal war. The attempt later on to make Germany
the forty-ninth state would be illegal, but not the invasion itself. Try
another scenario: imagine that the United States, threatened by an
imminent launch of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, had invaded (with
Security Council authorization, let's say-no question of the invasion's
legality) and then held Cuba in a state of occupation. Imagine that, over
time, Cuba and the United States became culturally and politically
integrated, and eventually Cuba elected to become the fifty-first state.
Would the initial invasion have therefore been illegal? No, because despite
its annexationist effect, it was legitimate at the time undertaken for military
reasons. In other words, not only are motive- and effects-based tests
unconvincing in administration, but they are insufficient for identifying an
annexation even in principle.
So there is a hole in international legal doctrine on this point-but it is
not a big hole (annexations are usually pretty clear, and often announced as
claims of right), and the challenge of filling it is just the usual, interstitial
judicial business of crafting a legal test with which to apply a preexisting
rule or principle. The proper test, I submit, is one based on military
necessity. A necessity-based test would harmonize the application of the
non-annexation principle with the general structure of the law governing

combat, where "[t]hroughout the sets of specific rules . . . policies of

military necessity and minimum destruction of values . . . recur
continuously as basic themes."' 176 A necessity-based test would also square
with general principles of the law of occupation, where the "general rule of
conduct" is "to diminish the evils of war, as far as military requirements
permit."' 177 Both bodies of law would favor a necessity-based test for more
specific reasons as well. If we think of the Barrier as essentially a seizure
of real property in the course of an occupation, the Fourth Geneva
Convention's specific provision prohibiting "[a]ny destruction by the
Occupying Power of real or personal property . . . except where such
destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations" would
apply. 17 8 And if we think of the Barrier instead as essentially a weapon
deployed in combat (as I suggest below), a necessity-based test would again
apply, for the principle of necessity is179one of the three principles that
traditionally regulate such uses of force.
Finally, what most recommends the necessity principle as the basis for
our annexation test is that a body of doctrine has grown up around the
principle that fits it out to serve what has been the basic purpose of law in
this area since the Lieber Code: to enable military forces to fight
effectively in pursuit of legitimate military goals while yet standing in the
way of wanton inhumanity and cruelty. 180 The concern often raised with
military necessity is that it might operate to permit as much as to restrain,
morphing into what in international law is known as Kriegsraison-the
doctrine, dominant in Germany at the time of the two World Wars, that "the
necessities of war (Kriegsraison)override[] and render[] inoperative the
ordinary laws and customs of war (Kriegsmanier),"'18 1 or in effect that
military expediency is a trump card and general permission. But the
doctrinal tradition (admittedly not precedent in the strict sense) that has
actually developed around the necessity principle, in cases involving
individuals put on trial for war crimes who raise the claim of necessity in
defense, is more restrained than that. 182 Courts in those settings have, first,
resisted definitions of necessity that would make the principle no more than
176. McDOUGAL & FELICIANO, supranote 70, at 521.

177. Hague Convention IV, supra note 88, pmbl.
178. Geneva Convention IV, supra note 69, art. 53.
179. See infra notes 191-92 and accompanying text.
180. FRANCIS LIEBER, U.S. WAR DEP'T, GENERAL ORDERS No. 100: INSTRUCTIONS FOR
THE GOVERNMENT OF ARMIES OF THE UNITED STATES IN THE FIELD arts. 15-16 (1863)
("Military necessity admits of all direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies ....
Military necessity does not admit of cruelty ....").
181. McDoUOAL & FELICIANO, supra note 70, at 672.
182. Id. at 674-79 (discussing cases); Scott Horton, Kriegsraison or Military Necessity?
The Bush Administration's Wilhelmine Attitude Towards the Conduct of War, 30 FORDHAM
INT'L L.J. 576, 589 (2007) (arguing that "[t]he Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals" sounded
"the death knell of the doctrine of Kriegsraison" but that "[w]hat survived was a notion of
military necessity close in spirit and letter to that originally articulated by Lieber" (citation
omitted)).
"convenience, expediency, and interest"; 183 second, required that the

military defendant's decision have been based on a "reasonableappraisal of
the features of a tactical situation"; 184 and third, approached the inquiry
generally on the basis of "particular constellation[s] of facts."' 185 Now, if
we were to think of the Barrier as itself a defendant in court, prima facie
guilty of annexation but potentially justified under the defense of necessity
(or if that is too fanciful, if we were to think of the military commander
who decided to build the Barrier as the defendant), these three standards
would dictate a factually intensive process, an objective reasonableness
standard, and a requirement of restraint that could be met only for serious
security threats-or, in other words, the ability to fight effectively, but only
for legitimate military goals and without cruelty. And thus the purpose for
which this body of law exists is met. Necessity in this case is not complete
permission. It is constrained permission-the sort of constrained
permission that makes the very notion of a body of law governing war a
reasonable social ideal.
The rule, then, should be that where a state is lawfully engaged in
international armed conflict and has seized or made use of enemy territory
while making no claim of sovereign right to that territory, the seizure or use
is non-annexationist to the extent objectively reasonable as a matter of
military necessity. Or, to restate that rule with regard to the case at hand,
building the Barrier was no annexation to the extent the Barrier was
amenable at all points along its route to an objectively reasonable military
justification.
I would like to highlight several consequences of this test.
First, assuming the Israeli High Court's fact-finding was sound (as I
think it was), building the Barrier within the West Bank was not an
annexation-for the court's primary finding was that the Barrier's route
was justified from a military point of view.' 86 In fact, the first steps of my
necessity-based analysis and the Israeli court's motivation-based analysis
are the same: both are fixed on whether the Barrier's route makes sense in
light of the military threat.187 The difference is that the ultimate guesswork
in the Israeli opinion-the inference that, because the Barrier was amenable
to a military justification, it was constructed solely for a military purpose-
is taken out of the equation. I think someone could reasonably suspect that
a desire to annex parts of the West Bank influenced at least some of the
Israeli officials who helped authorize the Barrier. But if a good faith fact-
finder scrutinizes the evidence and determines that the Barrier was
necessary on military grounds, and if the context was one of international
armed conflict in which Israel acted under its right of self-defense and made
183. McDOUGAL & FELICIANO, supra note 70, at 678.

184. Id. (emphasis added).
185. Id. at 675.
no claim of right to the parts of the West Bank it seized, that suspicion
shouldn't matter.
Second, a test based on military necessity would not authorize building
the settlements, for the settlements were not an act of self-defense in
wartime. 188 It would, however, authorize building the Barrier around the
settlements if necessary to protect the safety of the citizens living in
them. 189 In other words, there is a subtle but important and, I think,
sensible distinction here between building the Barrier, building the
settlements, and protecting the settlements. The first and last are non-
annexationist territorial incursions because they can be justified on grounds
of military necessity; the second is an annexationist territorial incursion
because it cannot. That the necessity-based test can make this distinction-
that it can authorize the Barrier without thereby authorizing the
settlements-is one of its strengths.
Third, a test based on military necessity would not permit treating the
West Bank land between the Barrier and the Green Line as if it belonged to
Israel. If, for example, Israel were to take advantage of the Barrier's
protection to begin a new settlement in the West Bank, Palestinians should
have the right to sue to enjoin the construction. The logic here is the same
as the logic concerning the existing settlements: Israel might have a
military justification for building the Barrier past the Green Line, but not
for expanding civilian Israeli life into land that remains Palestinian as a
matter of law.
Fourth, a test based on military necessity is self-limiting: territorial
incursions based on military necessity become illegal when the necessity
fades. A stable peace would give Palestinians the right to sue to have the
Barrier torn down.
The question here finally, as this is a jurisprudential study, is whether the
doctrinal hole in the part of international law governing annexation
undermines the legal character of the Barrier case. The answer in my view
is a clear no. Yes, there is a hole, but it is not the kind of chasm that
threatens to open up a legal anarchy where there are no rules or principles
or sources of law to serve as guides. The kind of interstitial doctrinal
development called for here is part of the craft. And the development
offered above-a legal test based on the principle of military necessity for
the limited instances of an ambiguous seizure of land in the context of
lawful armed conflict-is the right answer given the principles, analogues,
and policies at work in this body of law.
3. Humanitarian Rights
The armed conflict context showed us how to ask about annexation; it
can also show us how to ask about humanitarian rights. The key is the
distinction, part of the architecture of international law today, between the

189. See supra note 65 and accompanying text.
jus ad bellum (the law governing the initiation of armed conflict) and the
jus in bello (the law governing the conduct of armed conflict). The jus ad
bellum starts from a position of peace; it asks questions about the legality of
the resort to force, concerns issues like aggression and self-defense, and is
at the center of the twentieth century's attempt to prohibit the unilateral
initiation of force. The jus in bello starts from a position of war; it asks
questions about whether the conflict is being conducted lawfully, concerns
issues like the treatment of civilians and prisoners of war, and dates back to
an era in which the law's humbler aspiration was not to prohibit war but
only (as a classic nineteenth century treaty put it) to "alleviat[e] as much as
possible the calamities of war." 190 If the Barrier was built in the context of
international armed conflict, as we have established, then we are in the jus
in bello category, and with that category comes a certain legal framework:
the "basic international formula" of the jus in bello is that the use of force
"must be necessary in the context, proportional to need, and capable of
discriminating between combatant and noncombatant."' 9 1 Necessity,
proportionality,discrimination-thethree are a sort of mantra to military
lawyers today. 192 They are the foundation on which Palestinian rights
claims can, with accuracy and a reasonable degree of objectivity, be set.
Barak's subjectivity, recall, took hold in two ways. The first had to do
with what I called the derivation of the principle of proportionality-that is,
with its selection as the applicable law in the Barrier case. In this regard,
Barak took us on a legal odyssey from the specific provisions of the 1907
Hague Regulations and Fourth Geneva Convention, to the animating
principle of all humanitarian law, to what he called a "general principle[]"
"found deep" in all law, before finally returning to the Barrier case with his
principle in hand. 193 There was something forced about the whole business.
But look above: there proportionality is, the second member of our trio,
brought to the stage by the context of an international armed conflict and
the legal framework that context compels-the applicable law no longer
something we need to go off and find or forge in the deep tunnels of the
law, but that comes to us, as it should, immanent in the factual and legal
190. Declaration Renouncing the Use, in Time of War, of Explosive Projectiles Under
400 Grammes Weight para. 1, Nov. 29-Dec. 11, 1868, 138 Consol. T.S. 297 (the
Declaration of St. Petersburg).
191. W. Michael Reisman, The Tormented Conscience: Applying and Appraising
Unauthorized Coercion, 32 EMORY L.J. 499, 540-41 (1983); see also Protocol Additional to
the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of
International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I) arts. 35(2), 51(4), 51(5)(b), June 8, 1977, 1125
U.N.T.S. 3 (entered into force Dec. 7, 1978) [hereinafter Geneva Protocol] (prohibiting the
use of weapons that cause "unnecessary suffering"; attacks whose civilian cost is "excessive
in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated"; and all "indiscriminate
attacks," defined as those "of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian
objects without distinction").
192. See, e.g., JUDGE-ADvOCATE GENERAL'S LEGAL CTR. & SCH., OPERATIONAL LAW
HANDBOOK 10-14 (John Rawcliffe & Jeannine Smith eds., 2006) (stating, for use by U.S.
military lawyers, that the law of war rests on principles of necessity, proportionality, and
discrimination).
193. See supra Part I.B.2.
setting of the case. Viewed from the standpoint of its context, the Barrier is
essentially a defensive weapon deployed in war-a shield. The law that
applies to it is the law that applies to any weapon so deployed. In other
words, when the case's factual situation is understood as I think it must
be-as international armed conflict, with the Barrier constituting a use of
force within that conflict-it turns out that the selection of the principle of
proportionality need not have been so subjective, so chosen. Along with
necessity and discrimination, the principle of proportionality would have
been clearly applicable law.
The second way in which Barak's subjectivity took hold had to do with
the application of the principle of proportionality, which in Barak's hands
involved a balancing analysis of a particularly discretionary and values-
driven kind; it was never clear why someone couldn't strike the opposite
balance with no worse claim to being legally correct. 194 And with that
problem in mind, let's notice another: that the principle of proportionality
is actually quite a poor fit for the concerns Barak voiced when he discussed
the Palestinian situation. When Barak took up the Barrier's effect on the
village of Beit Sourik, for example, his chief points were that villagers and
especially farmers "will be cut off' from their lands and crops, and that the
Barrier wraps around the village so tightly that it "stifle[s] daily life" ("a
veritable chokehold"). 19 5 He sounds these same points again and again
throughout the analysis, and when he finally turns from examining the
Barrier's individual parts to "look out over the proportionality of the entire
route," we hear them one last time: the Barrier "separates the eight
villages ... from more than 30,000 dunams [30 square kilometers] of their
lands," he writes, with particular "injury to the farmers," and it "strikes
across the fabric of life of the entire population," often "pass[ing] right by
their homes," "surround[ing] the village," or "affect[ing] the links between
' 196
the local inhabitants and the urban centers.
The issue here is not disproportion. Nothing is compared. The issue here
is the capacity of civilians to go about civilian life. "At the very heart of the
law of armed conflict is the effort to protect noncombatants by insisting on
maintaining the distinction between them and combatants." 1 97 That is, the
issue here concerns the third member of our trio, the principle of
discrimination, and not only is it more discerning than proportionality as to
the real issues in this case, but it is more objective in application as well.
The reason the Barrier had to be moved to unburden Palestinian interests
wasn't some mysterious balancing of two great abstractions, security and
194. See supra Part I.B.2.

195. HCJ 2056/04 Beit Sourik Vill. Council v. Gov't of Isr. [2004] IsrSC 58(5) 807, 855,
translatedin 43 I.L.M. 1099, 1124 (2004).
197. W. Michael Reisman, Editorial Comment, Holding the Center of the Law of Armed
Conflict, 100 AM. J. INT'L L. 852, 856 (2006); see also Geneva Protocol, supra note 191, art.
48 ("[T]he Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population
and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall
direct their operations only against military objectives.").
liberty, where, for this particular judge, liberty prevailed despite the gravest
security interests at stake. The reason was that the Barrier's weight had to
fall chiefly on those inclined to do harm to Israel, and so long as it was built
along such a route as to press right up against homes and cut farmers off
from crops and villagers off from urban centers and all the rest, its direction
of effect was as much toward noncombatants as combatants. I earlier
analogized the Barrier to a shield, and that analogy is useful as far as it
goes, but the problem is that a shield does not harm third parties. The better
metaphor is this: Imagine that you are locked in a house. There are people
with you in the house who are violently disposed to you, and others who are
not. It happens that all these people, violent and peaceful, are in one room
of the house. You lock the door of that room from the outside. Was that a
lawful act of self-defense? No, because it is not lawful to roll
noncombatants in with combatants and treat them all alike.
The practical outcome of this analysis is almost identical to Barak's. I
would find it legal to build the Barrier in the West Bank, but not to build it
along a route that burdened ordinary Palestinian life so heavily. What I
have changed is the legal foundation for that position. In my view, rather
than grounding the annexation analysis in motive, Barak should have
grounded it in military necessity, and rather than grounding the
humanitarian judgment in proportionality and that in the general principles
of all law, Barak should have grounded it in the law of war requirement that
weapons discriminate between combatants and noncombatants.
II. INTERNATIONAL LAW AND LAW'S SELF-CONSTITUTING VALUES

We turn now from the question of whether the Barrier case had or could
have had the character of law to whether international law in general has or
could have that character. This, then, is where we begin building a theory
of law against which international law can be measured. And as that is a
formidable undertaking-though not as formidable in this instance as it
might appear-it's important here at the outset to say a word about what
this theory is and what it is not.
First, the idea here is not to take up the theoretical contentions of Hart
and Raz and Dworkin and the other great figures of jurisprudence,
borrowing a little here, critiquing a little there, eventually constructing a
theory of the same kind as theirs but professedly a better version of the
type. The idea here is rather to probe the intuition with which this Article
began-the intuition that international law is not law properly so called-so
as to specify that intuition's component parts, thus bringing to self-
consciousness the view of law already implicit in our experience of law. In
other words, I present below four constitutive values of law as law:
efficacy, the capacity to obligate on grounds of legitimate authority, the
capacity to obligate on grounds of moral rationality,and objectivity. My
fundamental claim is that if you interrogate the intuition about international
law doggedly enough, seeking out its premises and trying to state them in
general form, these four values are what you will come to in the end. And
2502 FORDHAM LA WREVIEW [Vol. 78
as the intuition is, to judge from its power over some centuries of inquiry
and debate, deeply rooted in the experience of law and the social practices
that go into forming that experience, there is reason to think a
reconstructive engagement with the intuition has something to teach us
about what law is-or at least, what in practice we take law to be. Now,
there are things we might want from a definitive theory of law that just are
not. given by a theoretical approach of this kind; to specify the claims
implicit in our experience of law is not to defend those claims. But this is
not a definitive theory of law. And that is why the project here is not as
ambitious as it might seem.
Second, each of the four categories of value just mentioned represents a
cluster of ideas. As directions the intuition for law as law takes when put
under scrutiny, there are different ways of thinking about each of the four
and really no definitive vocabulary for the set. Efficacy is tied up with
enforcement, sovereignty, law's actuality and power-its bindingness.
Obligation is a matter of law's normativity (bindingness in another sense),
with legitimate authority going to law's foundations, procedures, and
location within constituted institutional structures, and moral rationality
going to substantive justification, to justice, and to the exercise of public
reason. And finally, objectivity could equally be thought of as law's
impersonality, involving, among other things, the distinction between law
and politics. In each case, I've tried to select some optimal label for the
cluster-one that identifies the value the set is meant to serve (thus, for
example, "legitimate authority" over "institutions and procedures"); one
that is relatively accurate, inclusive, and fundamental (thus "efficacy" over
"enforcement," for reasons I'll explain); and one that, where the choices are
otherwise matched, is comparatively accessible (thus "obligation" over
"normativity"). But it's important not to make too much of the labels. The
test of a conceptual structure that aims to specify the contours of experience
is that one recognizes oneself-one's own musings as to whether
international law is law, one's own encounters with law's nature in other
contexts-in at least some parts of the structure, that one sees where
different kinds of concerns fit into the whole, where they go.
Third, as to how the four categories fit together, the theory here is
pluralistic and cumulative-by which I mean that, when tasked with
evaluating whether some act or text or institution or field of endeavor is of a
basically legal character, all four factors contribute to an all-things-
considered judgment, rather than any one factor (or subgroup of the four)
having the status of necessary and sufficient condition. 198 Imagine, for
example, that we were trying to determine whether the U.S. Supreme
Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education199 should be regarded as
basically legal or basically political in character. That determination would
be, with regard to efficacy, quite mixed: the National Guard did escort
198. I'm grateful to J6rg Schaub for pointing out this assumption of my theoretical
approach.
199. 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
those children to school, but it was a close call, and enforcement was
delayed at the start ("with all deliberate speed"2 00) and touch and go for
decades. As to obligation (of both kinds), there is no question: the decision
was grounded in both the Court's authority to interpret constitutional text
and in moral imperatives of extraordinary force. Yet as to objectivity, few
lawyers think Brown anything like the inevitable result of neutral legal
principles and judicial craft. So what to think? A monistic view of law,
prizing, say, objectivity above all else, would hold the decision simply to be
politics. A monistic view focused wholly on normativity would regard it as
unquestionably law. But a pluralistic, cumulative theory of the kind in view
here acknowledges the ambiguity we actually experience in encountering
that decision and others of its kind-decisions where perhaps the grade is a
sort of "C" for efficacy, "As" for both forms of obligation, "F" for
objectivity, and whether the whole should qualify as law or not is up for
20 1
grabs.
Now, there's room for further theoretical work here: it would be
worthwhile to try to get a better sense of the relative weight these four
factors should carry and a clearer idea of just where the law/non-law
threshold should go. But the basic insight our intuition serves up--the
insight that law as experienced is a matter of multiple values in
combination, none of which is strictly necessary or sufficient by itself but
which in combination get some act or artifact or enterprise over the
law/non-law threshold-is a benefit of approaching legal theory in the way
we have. A lot of purportedly legal acts have an ambivalence or a more-or-
less quality to their character as law, and it's good to have a conceptual
framework for understanding that analog ambiguity. 202 A lot of legal
theories exclude too much that ought to matter. 2 3 And, in my view at least,
it just isn't plausible to regard any of the four factors as strictly necessary or
strictly sufficient. If law must absolutely be efficacious, should we regard
the prohibition on marijuana use in the United States today as non-law? If
it were enough that law be efficacious, should we regard the conquistadors'
edicts regarding Native American land as law in the fullest sense? Our
instinct for law is pluralistic and cumulative for a reason; there is nothing
200. Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 349 U.S. 294, 301 (1955).

201. I think this is the conception of law Lon Fuller was driving at when, in his reply to
H.L.A. Hart, he said, "When we realize that order itself is something that must be worked
for, it becomes apparent that the existence of a legal system, even a bad or evil legal system,
is always a matter of degree. When we recognize this simple fact of everyday legal
experience,..." Fuller, supra note 119, at 646.
202. A great deal of constitutional law seems to have this character. See infra notes 278-90
and accompanying text. Two vivid examples, among a near-limitless supply, are Lawrence v.
Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), and Wickard v. Filburn,317 U.S. 111 (1942).
203. Particularly problematic is the sort of theoretical position that excludes part of our
experience of law by fiat, in virtue of an unjustified fidelity to some pieces of the whole and
a blind spot for the rest-the kind of theory that, as Bernard Williams put it in the context of
moral philosophy, is "frivolous, in not allowing for anyone's experience, including the
author's own," or "stupid" in holding up "an impoverished experience ... as the rational
norm." Williams, supra note 18, at 217.
theoretically wrong with such a view; and the stricter views that prevail in
jurisprudence today are not more sound than the one our experience of law
teaches.
Fourth, the theoretical effort here is still empirical, still grounded in the
Barrier case. The goal is not just to specify the claims implicit in our
experience of law but to see, once those claims are clear, whether they are
borne out in fact. There's no reason why the intuition against international
law could not tell us something true about the nature of law, and false, or at
least crude and partly false, about the status of international law. In fact, I
think that's exactly what is going on here (as I argue below). And thus
what I earlier called a reconstructive legal theory proves also to be a critical
legal theory-one that, by identifying the standards that account for our
judgments, renders those judgments more transparent and enables us to see 20 4
whether the standards on which they rest are being correctly applied.
This capacity to be critical is a major issue in the broader project of
20 5
reconstructive social theory of which this Article is a part.
Finally, there is one part of the instinct against international law that is
prudential rather than jurisprudential, concerned not with whether
international law is law but only with whether treating it as law is necessary
and useful as a matter of power and interest. This prudential concern,
though important for policy, just falls outside the study here. The omission
is smaller than it might seem because the jurisprudential theory in this
Article is so inclusive; concerns that might on some views be considered
issues of prudence are here brought into the substance of law and covered
under a different heading. For example, the thought that international
institutions might not be trustworthy surfaces below in the discussions of
legitimate authority and objectivity. The thought that international law
might demand of us something unreasonable or dangerous is taken up here
in the discussion of moral rationality. Still, there remains a core of
prudential concern in this arena that is just asking a different question than
mine, and which has to be set aside.
So: efficacy, obligation as legitimate authority, obligation as moral
rationality,and objectivity--four parts to our experience of law as law, four
questions about international law and courts. How should we answer those
questions on the strength of the Barrier case?
A. Efficacy
The belief that law as law must be enforced, or at least enforceable, is
extraordinarily powerful-the heart and soul of law on some accounts, and
almost always the first thing said when conversation touches on the
question of whether international law is law properly so called. What is the

205. See, e.g., AXEL HONNETH, Reconstructive Social Criticism with a Genealogical
Proviso: On the Idea of "Critique" in the FrankfurtSchool, in PATHOLOGIES OF REASON 43
(James Ingram trans., 2009).
root of this belief? Surely not some consciously held theory of law; no
theory is so widely believed. It is rather a felt sense that law as law stands
in a special relationship to consequences in the world, that law must bridge
the world of the hypothetical and the world of the actual in a way most
forms of discourse (law is, after all, a form of discourse) do not. Law 20 6
brings something about; that is why it is not just another sort of talk.
Actuality, then, is one component of the enforcement intuition. But that
can't be the whole story because a lot of talk brings something about and
yet isn't what anyone would call "enforced" (consider the persuasive orator
who moves people to act). The difference is that law makes its
consequences come about, bringing them to pass in virtue of imperatives
suffused with a certain sort of power-a quasi-causal power, not unlike
what Hume, in speaking of the relationship of cause to effect, called the
"power of production." 20 7 In short, when the enforcement intuition is put
under scrutiny, it proves to have two components-power and actuality-
where the two stand in an ordered relationship such that the first is the
ground for the second. Let us call the two together efficacy--the power to
make actual. Embedded in our sense of law as law, surfacing in our doubts
about the status of international law where unenforced or unenforceable, is
20 8
an instinct for law's efficacy.
Now, thus far I take it that we have been observing a certain necessary
core to the enforcement intuition-the "making actual" or "efficacy"
center-which seems to contain an important if extremely elusive element
of truth. But around that core is an association or picture, which is only
contingently related to the central insight, and which is likely to give rise to
error in thinking about the enforcement of international law. It goes like
this: the source of law's causal power is, of course, usually a government,
which stands over the citizen and puts its power of sanction behind its own
commands. It's easy to mistake this arrangement for enforcement itself and
think that to have a governmental overlord is simply what enforcement
means. This was Austin's error, and with respect to international law, it
had a predictable consequence: Austin observed that there is no power and
206. This line of thought naturally brings to mind speech-acts (e.g., "Ipromise"), and
there might be something fruitful in that direction. But I'm skeptical. Most legal
consequences are not the act side of a speech-act. The better if stranger analogy might
actually be to spells and incantations-utterances that are supposed to bring something about
of their own power.
207. DAvtD HUME, A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE 137 (The World Publ'g Co. 1962)
(1739). Note that Hume was no friend to the notion of causality he captured with the phrase.
208. A blind spot for law as law's efficacy is the chief problem, in my view, with certain
theoretical traditions-prominent in continental Europe, and sometimes associated with
postmodernism-in which law is fundamentally a form of "discourse" whose distinguishing
characteristic is how participants communicate with each other. See, e.g., Gunther Teubner,
Breaking Frames: The Global Interplay of Legal and Social Systems, 45 AM. J. COMP. L.
149, 156-61, 164 (1997) (defending the legal character of transnational "lex mercatoria"
because it is an "emerging global legal discourse" that defines itself with the law's
"specialized binary code, legal/illegal"). On the other hand, a blind spot for most everything
but efficacy has been a significant problem in the Anglo-American tradition.
no foreseeable arrangement of power in the world that could consistently

make states, those sources of power, obey (which is still true), and
concluded that a form of law without the power to make its imperatives
actual isn't really law at all (which is still reasonable). 20 9 But the
arrangement on which Austin was fixated is only a mechanism by which the
law's imperatives become actual-a means where efficacy is the end-and
the key to understanding how enforcement functions in international law is
to see that it is not the only one.
There are two basic facts regarding enforcement in the Barrier case.
First, the ICJ ruled that Israel must move the Barrier out of the West Bank,
and Israel refused. Granted, the ICJ's advisory opinion was formally
nonbinding-nonbinding, that is, not de facto but de jure-but it was
nonetheless a putatively authoritative statement of what was legal and
illegal, and it was denounced and then ignored.2 10 Second, the Israeli High
Court applied exactly the same body of law to order that the Israeli
government move the Barrier away from Palestinian communities-at great
expense, in the middle of a war, in the setting of the war, at acknowledged
risk to Israeli life-and the Israeli government complied. 2 11 The question
is: What model of international law's enforcement can make sense of these
facts? Should we conclude that the enforcement part of the intuition against
international law was borne out in the Barrier case or not?
Scholars in international law and international relations have been
studying when and why states observe their international legal obligations
for some time. A basic division in the field, crucial to understanding the
Barrier case, is between those who approach states as unified entities that
relate to the international system as corporate wholes and those who view
states as disaggregated assemblages whose various domestic elements
might relate to the international system in different ways. 2 12 Another
important distinction is between those who think compliance depends
primarily on interest or power (states comply because they are self-seeking
or coerced) and those who think it depends primarily on norms (states 2 13
comply because they take themselves to be legitimately bound).
209. AUSTIN, supra note 1, at 30-31, 117, 122-24, 171. In my view, Austin was not
wrong to insist that commands backed by power are an element in what law is. He was
wrong to view that element as law's necessary and sufficient condition, and also wrong to
associate such commands so indelibly with an "overlord" picture of state sovereignty.
210. See supra note 16. It's actually rather odd to think about how a court can
definitively state that something is illegal without thereby ordering compliance.
211. Id.
212. See Oona A. Hathaway, Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?, 111 YALE
L.J. 1935, 1942-62 (2002) (surveying the various schools of thought on the issue); Harold
Hongju Koh, How Is InternationalHuman Rights Law Enforced?, 74 IND. L.J. 1397, 1401-08
(1999) (same).
213. See Hathaway, supra note 212, at 1942-62; Koh, supra note 212, at 1401-08. Note
that both types of position, and any other such position, take as a given that the law's
imperatives must be made actual somehow, and proceed to debate the mechanism by which
this might be done. Thus the entire field of inquiry falls into the philosophical framework I
articulate above.
Austin's view above is implicitly corporatist and power-based; a state

stands to the international system analogously to the way an individual
stands to a weak state. But it is the opposite view, the disaggregating,
normativist view-and particularly in this vein of thought the work 2of Oona
14
Hathaway-that can make sense of enforcement in the Barrier case.
For about eight years, Hathaway has been developing and analyzing a
large body of data about when states ratify and obey human rights treaties.
What she has shown is counterintuitive and in equal parts cause for hope
and disappointment. First the disappointment: joining human rights
treaties neither strongly correlates with nor reliably brings about good
human rights practices, and in fact sometimes correlates with and even
helps bring about poor human rights practices. 2 15 It seems the most
undemocratic, rights-violating states are often eager to join the treaties, but
not to comply with them, while more democratic states are often reluctant 2 16
to join, but likely to comply (and if necessary, improve) when they do.
In other words, "democratic and nondemocratic nations likely have entirely
different commitment patterns," 2 17 and the challenge that has occupied
Hathaway for some years is to explain those patterns. With non-
democracies, the explanation is relatively straightforward: since the treaties
aren't externally enforced, joining and not complying enables them to
rights posturing. 2 18 With
realize the costless reputational benefits of human
the democracies, the explanation is more complex, and I think it is fair to
say that Hathaway's focus has sharpened over time. In 2002, she speculates
rather briefly about the ways in which "domestic interest groups," "courts,"
and "news organizations" pressure democratic governments to live up to
their international obligations. 2 19 In 2003, her focus is on "the internal
enforcement process," with stress on the "rule of law tradition." 220 By
2005, "domestic actors us[ing] the country's own legal system to enforce
the terms of international legal agreements" is one of the "central ways in
which treaties shape what countries do." 2 21 And finally, in 2007, "the most
214. I focus on Hathaway because her studies distill what in my view is the essential
point so clearly and so empirically. But there are other important "disaggregating,
normativists" whose work could also illuminate the issues here-in particular, Anne-Marie
Slaughter and Harold Koh. See generally, e.g., Anne-Marie Burley, Law Among Liberal
States: Liberal Internationalism and the Act of State Doctrine, 92 COLUM. L. REv. 1907
(1992); Harold Hongju Koh, The 1998 FrankelLecture: Bringing InternationalLaw Home,
35 Hous. L. REv. 623 (1998); Harold Hongju Koh, Why Do Nations Obey International
Law?, 106 YALE L.J. 2599 (1997); Anne-Marie Slaughter, InternationalLaw in a World of
Liberal States, 6 EUR. J. INT'L L. 503 (1995).
215. Hathaway, supra note 212, at 1935, 1940, 1976-2002.
216. Id.; see also Oona A. Hathaway, The Cost of Commitment, 55 STAN. L. REv. 1821,
1844-46, 1856 (2003). Afghanistan and Columbia, for example, promptly ratified the
Convention Against Torture of 1987; Belgium and Iceland refused for a decade. Id. at 1822.
217. Hathaway, supra note 216, at 1856.
218. See Hathaway, supra note 212, at 2002-20.
219. Id. at 2019.
220. Hathaway, supra note 216, at 1834, 1837.
221. Oona A. Hathaway, Between Power and Principle: An Integrated Theory of
InternationalLaw, 72 U. CHI. L. REv. 469, 473 (2005).
remarkable and least appreciated aspect of the growing reach of

international law" is the way in which international law in democracies is
"enforced by states against themselves," meaning "enforced by domestic
courts and political institutions that pressure their own government to live
up to the promises it has made." 22 2 The trend is instructive; Hathaway's
work as a body has a sort of emergent basic teaching. International
obligations are effectively enforced when domestic courts regard them as
law in a rule of law state.
Thus Hathaway comes by her own, highly empirical route to the
distinction that in good measure drives this paper: the distinction between
law and courts in the international system. What Hathaway shows is that
the enforcement of international law is unintelligible without that
distinction-that enforcement in no intrinsic way depends on international
law's character as internationallaw, but on the institutional setting in which
the law is applied. International law can be enforced even in tough
circumstances, provided a domestic court in a rule of law democracy is
doing the enforcing. The Barrier case exactly bears this model out. In fact,
the case is almost like a controlled experiment. The law involved in the ICJ
and Israeli High Court was the same. 223 The government addressed and the
relationship between that government and the international community
were the same. 224 The extent to which that government was subject to an
external power that might force its hand was the same (or, if anything,
greater in the situation where it didn't comply than in the situation where it
did).225 And the interests and cost-benefit calculus connected to the
situation on the ground were basically the same. 226 (Granted the burdens of
the two courts' rulings were different, but they were not radically different;
the Palestinian side won and the Barrier had to be uprooted in both, and my
sense is that, had the Israeli court ordered the Barrier pulled back all the
way to the Green Line, the Israeli executive would have complied.) What
changed in the main was the court issuing the judgment, and that made all
the difference. Actually, I suspect that the type of law at issue-domestic,
international, corporate, administrative, whatever-is really not that
important a part of the enforcement story. International courts would have
a tough time enforcing domestic law if it fell to them to do so, and domestic
222. Oona A. Hathaway, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: Domestic Enforcement of International

Law, in INTERNATIONAL LAW STORIES 229, 229, 260 (John E. Noyes et al. eds., 2007).
223. Contra those who argue that compliance turns on the normative force of legitimate
and just international rules (rather than the institutional actor imposing the rule). See, e.g.,
FRANCK, FAIRNESS, supra note 6.
224. Contra those who argue that compliance turns on the persuasive links between a
government and the international community with which it is bound up. See, e.g., ABRAM
CHAYES & ANTONIA HANDLER CHAYES, THE NEW SOVEREIGNTY: COMPLIANCE WITH
INTERNATIONAL REGULATORY AGREEMENTS (1995).
225. Contra those who argue that compliance turns on the coercive calculus of
international power. See, e.g., HANS J. MORGENTHAU, POLITICS AMONG NATIONS: THE
STRUGGLE FOR POWER AND PEACE (4th ed. 1967).
226. Contra those who argue that compliance turns on rational choice and national self-
interest at the level of the state. See, e.g., GOLDSMITH & POSNER, supra note 2.
courts in democratic states enforce international law about as easily as they

enforce similarly demanding domestic law.
The Barrier case can also clarify something in Hathaway's account, for
while her analysis of enforcement is basically focused on norms
(democratic, rule of law norms) rather than power or interest, she is never
very clear about the character of the normativity at issue. But then, she
didn't have in view the contrast between international and domestic courts'
capacity for enforcement where both are addressing a democratic state. The
relationship between a democratic government with a rule of law tradition
and its own courts is different in kind from the relationship between such a
government and international courts. In a rule of law democracy, that first
relationship is all but sacred, and executive officials are extremely reluctant
to cut the threads of the constitutional structure they are duty-bound to
protect and in which their own legitimacy is bound up. But that second
relationship is not sacred in the present order, and since an international
court is not a part of the constitutional structure to which the executive is
attached, and may furthermore issue judgments that encroach from the
outside on the security and interests of the state to which the executive is
constitutionally bound, defiance in no necessary way violates executive
duty or undermines executive legitimacy. 227 Norms are at the bottom of
this, of course. Domestic courts lack both purse and sword just as
international courts do, and their capacity to enforce international law is a
product, not of power or interest crudely, but of the normative order of a
democratic state.
Thus the skeptical intuition about international law's enforcement proves,
not exactly wrong, but crude. It is reasonable to question whether
something purporting to be law that has no power to bring about
consequences in the world should really have the status of law. But
international law in the Barrier case had that power when it was in the
hands of the Israeli High Court, and lacked it when it was in the hands of
the ICJ, and so there is nothing in principle about international law, nor
even about international law in the practical arrangement of power in the
world today, that should bar it from the law's estate. To the extent there is
an enforcement problem in the international system-and there is one; the
ICJ's impotence in the Barrier case is proof of that, as is Hathaway's record
of treaty failure-it is a problem with the mechanism of international
courts. Perhaps the problem also extends beyond international courts to
external institutions in general (including foreign courts and the United
227. The international or quasi-international courts of the European Union might well be
an exception-or are perhaps just an altogether different case-given the ways in which EU
membership has revised member states' constitutions and constitutional character. See, e.g.,
1958 CONST. art. 88(1)-(7) (Fr.) (stating that France "shall participate in the European
Union" and laying out governmental arrangements to that effect); GRUNDGESETZ [GG]
[Constitution] art. 23(l)-(7) (F.R.G.) (stating that Germany "shall participate in the
development of the European Union" and laying out governmental arrangements to that
effect, including provision to "amend or supplement this Basic Law" where necessary to
accommodate legal developments at the EU level).
Nations itself), for it is difficult to see how such institutions could stand
toward the constitutionally responsible agents of a democratic state as those
agents stand toward one another. But international law itself can and does
have the power to make its imperatives actual in what I earlier called, in
stating this Article's thesis, "the right, circumstances." 228 The right
circumstances are those in which the law's agent is a domestic court in a
rule of law state.
B. Obligation
The sense of law as law does riot end with enforcement, or any thug's or
tyrant's orders would be law in the fullest sense. 229 Law properly so called
carries with it a sense of obligation-the thing in virtue of which the law
deserves to be followed, the "ought" of law rather than the "must." Thus
we turn from actuality, the subject of the last section, to normativity, the
subject of this one. And thus we come to the second piece of the intuition
that international law is not law properly so called: doubts about whether
international law is entirely obligatory.
The unitary concept of legal obligation has split into two distinct strains
in our jurisprudential tradition-I suspect because the tradition has seen
such titanic battles between moralists and antimoralists. 23 ° One part of the
thinking on obligation focuses on procedural and institutional
foundations. 23 1 Of any claim to law, it asks: "Is this thing appropriately
grounded? Was it made aright-passed by Congress and ratified by the
President, promulgated by an agency after notice and comment, established
as fact after both parties were heard, etc.? And did the maker act within its
constituted institutional authority-according to Article I of the U.S.
Constitution, or the agency's organic statute, or the court's rules of
jurisdiction and standing, etc.?" There is a professionalized flavor to
approaching obligation this way; that is part of the appeal. It is solid,
technical, lawyerly; those uncomfortable approaching the concept of
obligation in expressly moral terms, but not so crude as to equate law with
force, here find a path to obligation through the gateway concept of
legitimate authority. Now, there are moral standards of a certain sort at
work here still. Legitimacy is finally a moral concept; if we ask whether
228. See supra p. 2460.

229. The classic statement of the point is Hart's: "Law surely is not the gunman situation
writ large, and legal order is surely not to be thus simply identified with compulsion."
H.L.A. Hart, Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals, 71 HARV. L. REv. 593, 603
(1958). Though it's telling that Hart speaks only of the gunman-the thug-and not the
tyrant.
230. Compare RONALD DwoRKIN, JUSTICE IN ROBES 14 (2006) ("A proposition of law is
true ... if it flows from principles of personal and political morality that provide the best
interpretation of the other propositions of law generally treated as true in contemporary legal
practice."), with RICHARD A. POSNER, THE PROBLEMATICS OF MORAL AND LEGAL THEORY 91
(1999) ("This chapter is about the infection of legal theory by moral theory .... ").
231. See, e.g., Hart, supra note 229, at 603 (arguing that "rules specifying the essential
lawmaking procedures" are "at the root of a legal system").
some case or statute or executive decision was made aright long enough,
we'll come in time to "We the People." And it is difficult even
conceptually to see how the law could derive a capacity to obligate from
procedures that are unsound and institutions that are unjust. 232 Nonetheless,
the moral ideas here concern procedure, not substance; we do not ask
whether the content of a case or statute or executive order is just or good on
the way to deciding whether it is law. And even then, the technical
questions hold the moral ones in abeyance.
The second approach to the concept of legal obligation focuses on
substantive rationality and morality. 233 Of any claim to law, it asks: "Is
this minimally rational? Is it just? Does it conduce to the good?" My
sense is that, despite some prominent contemporary proponents, this
perspective is on the defensive nowadays. "Natural law" (one of the names
for some of the views in this category) is in a state of embarrassment, and
any expressly moral approach to the law can expect to be met in academic
settings with skepticism and even mockery. 234 The paradox is that, while a
sort of positivism reigns when we talk theory, the moral perspective keeps
winning the century's big battles in practice-though one wouldn't know it
232. That Hart seemed to think it could, or not to notice this feature of legitimacy, was in
good measure what made his views so puzzling to Fuller. See, e.g., Fuller, supra note 119, at
632 ("[I]t is a cardinal virtue of Professor Hart's argument that it brings into the dispute the
issue of fidelity to law," but "its chief defect," which "comes most prominently to the fore in
his discussion of Gustav Radbruch and the Nazi regime," lies "in a failure to perceive and
accept the implications that this enlargement of the frame of argument necessarily entails."
(citing Hart, supra note 229, at 615-21)).
233. See, e.g., id. at 645 ("Law, considered merely as order, contains, then, its own
implicit morality."). There is a connection here-in Fuller's thought and in what I myself
mean by the category of "moral rationality"-between claims as to what is good and bad, or
right and wrong, and the commitment to reason itself. This is a difficult issue, and one with
an enormous history; it is something on which much of the tradition of practical philosophy
is centered. But the essential thought is perhaps that morality is an organic product of
reason, or form of reason, and that both morality and reason derive their capacity to obligate
from the normative force of good reasons. In any case, there is no question that Fuller was
thinking in this direction. See, e.g., id. at 636 ("[W]hen men are compelled to explain and
justify their decisions, the effect will generally be to pull those decisions toward
goodness .... ).
234. See, e.g., Brian Leiter, In Praise of Realism (and Against 'Nonsense' Jurisprudence)
1 (Jan. 23, 2010) (unpublished article), available at http://papers.ssm.com/
sol3/papers.cfmabstract_id=l 113461 ("Ronald Dworkin describes an approach to how
courts should decide cases that he associates with Judge Richard Posner and Professor Cass
Sunstein as 'a Chicago School of anti-theoretical, no-nonsense jurisprudence.' Since
Professor Dworkin takes his own view of adjudication to be diametrically opposed to that of
the Chicago School, it might seem fair, then, to describe Dworkin's own theory as an
instance of 'pro-theoretical, nonsense jurisprudence."' (quoting DWORKIN, supra note 230, at
50-51)). That thought (and tone) has a history in moral and legal philosophy. See RUDOLF
CARNAP, THE UNITY OF SCIENCE 26 (M. Black trans., 1934) ("All statements belonging to...
regulative Ethics . . . are in fact unverifiable and, therefore, unscientific. In the Viennese
Circle [the movement now known as "logical positivism"], we are accustomed to describe
such statements as nonsense .... ); Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies,in 'NONSENSE
UPON STILTS': BENTHAM, BURKE AND MARX ON THE RIGHTS OF MAN 46, 53 (Jeremy
Waldron ed., 1987) ("Naturalrights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights,
rhetorical nonsense,-nonsense upon stilts.").
2512 FORDHAM LA WREVIEW [Vol. 78
from the bravado of the losers. There may be no more significant

contemporary development in international law than Nuremberg and the
human rights tradition to which it gave rise, or in constitutional law than the
broadening of due process in all its various forms (with incorporation via a
concept of "fundamental rights" not to be overlooked), or in comparative
law than the global rise of judicial review as an instrument of rights
protection. 235 The very structure of legal argument in a post-formalist era
takes law's morality and rationality as premise, for every time we argue that
a rule's application should be based on its reason ("This case shouldn't
control that one, for the holding . . ." "This clause must apply here, for its
purpose . . ."), and every time we favor or disfavor a position because it
would give rise to welcome and sensible or absurd and incoherent results
("The case couldn't mean that, for if it did. . ." "The clause must mean this,
for otherwise . . ."), we commit ourselves pre-theoretically, by virtue of our
practice, to a morally and rationally laden conception of what law is. That
is to say we lawyers act on the moral sense every time we go to work in the
morning, and while our commitments in this regard are rarely in the
foreground, they're always there, hovering in the background-the moral
presence-and much of what we pretend is common sense, or sound
"policy," or just good plain pragmatism, is in fact the moral sense operating
236
within the zone of ordinary consensus.
The partisans of one or the other of these two forms of obligation have
been grappling and clawing at each other for generations now. Legal
positivism is defined by the conflict. 237 The Hart-Fuller debate is an entry
in the conflict-best read, I would argue, as essentially a disagreement over
the kind of obligation that can serve as a constitutive element in law
properly so called. 2 38 And lawyers and judges clash about whether the
claims of justice or only the claims of a morally bare but procedurally
legitimate positive law should direct decision. 239 But why these constant
235. The first two are probably familiar; the last might not be, but it has indubitably taken
place, with increasing recognition of its immense significance. See Martin Shapiro & Alec
Stone, The New Constitutional Politics of Europe, 26 COMP. POL. STUD. 397, 397 (1994)
("Long considered a North American anomaly, constitutional judicial review is today a
global phenomenon. Since 1945, Japan, India, the Philippines, Turkey, and more than a
dozen polities in Western Europe and Latin America have established or reesestablished
constitutional courts with review powers . ... The postcommunist regimes in the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Russia provide for the same.").
236. It is even so for the most spirited of our moral skeptics, lawyer-economists like
Richard Posner, see supra note 230, for no one is more insistent that law serve some
positively valorized end than they. And they know it, but would just rather not talk about
things that way-as though having moral commitments were like having a tic or a blemish,
something everyone sees but no one is so impolite as to mention. This is a complex tension
in legal realism's spirit, which would require careful discussion.
237. HART, supra note 1, at 185-86 ("Here we shall take Legal Positivism to mean the
simple contention that it is in no sense a necessary truth that laws reproduce or satisfy certain
demands of morality, though in fact they have often done so.").
238. See supra notes 118-22, 229, 231-33 and accompanying text.
239. The famous story to this effect has Judge Learned Hand wishing Justice Holmes
good-bye with the words, "Do justice, sir, do justice," and Holmes answering, "That is not
efforts at exclusion? Why can't we ask that law as law be both legitimate
and just-appreciating, in line with the reasonable pluralism discussed
above, that a deficit in either is not necessarily fatal, and might be
compensated with a surfeit of the other? 240 Inclusiveness, in any case, is
what the reconstructive approach would teach, for it is indubitably the case
that our experience and intuitions serve up both forms of obligation.
Inclusiveness makes good conceptual sense as well, for the capacity to
generate an obligation is what we are ultimately after here, and obviously a
norm might put us under a duty of obedience either because it is
authoritative or because it is in the right. And inclusiveness also squares
with tradition in political philosophy, where it is familiar ground to make a
distinction between substantive and procedural justifications for, say, a
democratic political order, or a conception of justice, or whatever else, and
241
to insist on both.
So the question here is: How does international law in the Barrier case
fare with regard to both forms of obligation? And is there, as we saw with
enforcement, a distinction to be made with respect to obligation between
international law and international courts?
1. Law's Legitimate Authority
As to the legitimacy and authority of the law applied in the Barrier case,
the question is this: what are the foundations for the three legal principles
properly at work in that case-non-annexation, national self-defense, and
discrimination between combatants and noncombatants? 24 2 All three are
considered principles of customary international law, and that is important
because the foundations of customary international law have come in for
serious challenge in recent years, starting with Curtis Bradley's and Jack
Goldsmith's now-famous Critique.24 3 "By way of background," Bradley
and Goldsmith state, "there are two principal sources of international law:
treaties and CIL [customary international law]."' 244 The first are "express
my job. It is my job to apply the law." ROBERT H. BORK, THE TEMPTING OF AMERICA: THE
POLITICAL SEDUCTION OF THE LAW 6 (1990). But the controversy is so much in our blood
that really just a list of names-Warren, Scalia, Reinhardt, Easterbrook-will call it to mind,
like Homer's catalogue of ships.
240. See supra notes 198-203 and accompanying text. In a pluralistic and cumulative
theory of the sort at work in this Article, a surfeit of any of law's constitutive values might
compensate (at least in some measure) for a deficit in another-but that is doubly true here,
where both legitimate authority and moral rationality serve the function of grounding law's
normativity.
241. See, e.g., JOHN RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE 73-78 (rev. ed. 1999) (charting the
relationship between "fair equality of opportunity" and "procedural justice"); MICHAEL J.
SANDEL, DEMOCRACY'S DISCONTENT: AMERICA N SEARCH OF A PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY 25
(1996) (critiquing the "procedural republic" of liberal thought for lacking a shared,
substantive "conception of the good").
242. See supra Part I.C.
243. Curtis A. Bradley & Jack L. Goldsmith, Customary International Law as Federal
Common Law: A Critiqueof the Modern Position, 110 HARv. L. REv. 815 (1997).
244. Id. at 817.
agreements among nations"; the second is "the law of the international

community that 'results from a general and consistent practice of states
followed by them from a sense of legal obligation."' 245 Now, there is an
obvious positivistic attack on a mere "practice . .. followed . . . from a
sense of legal obligation," 2 46 and Bradley and Goldsmith sound this attack.
at certain points: the notion of a "'transcendental body of law outside of
any particular State,' 24 7 they write, unattached to any "particular sovereign
authority" 248 and applied "in the absence of statutory or constitutional
authorization," 249 shows an "inattention to sources of authority [that] may
seem odd to modem lawyers" 25 0 -and is, incidentally, "in tension with
basic notions of American representative democracy."251 Having sounded
that positivist theme, however, Bradley and Goldsmith don't rest there; they
don't depend on positivist theory alone. They depend on the fact that Erie
RailroadCo. v. Tompkins 252 depended on positivist theory and imposed that
theory on U.S. federal courts: If "[p]rior to Erie, federal courts applied a
common law (which included CIL) that did not emanate from a particular
sovereign authority," that way of "looking at law" was "overruled" by
Erie's "embrace of legal positivism"-indeed, "overruled" and "replaced"
with the proposition that "'law in the sense in which courts speak of it today
does not exist without some definite authority behind it"' and thus a
"sovereign source for every rule of decision." 253 The Bradley-Goldsmith
achievement, as I read it, was to fuse a positivistic attack on customary
international law with this reading of contemporary federal courts post-
Erie.
The Erie half of this argument is outside my focus here, but the positivist
argument is an important challenge to the type of international law at work
in the Barrier case-and the lesson of the Barrier case is how much more
complicated the issue is in practice than it might seem when Bradley and
Goldsmith abstract from every particularity and take up "CIL" (the very
label reflects the problem) at wholesale. The principle of non-annexation,
for example, is a prime example of customary international law, but it is not
uncodified and not ungrounded. It is rather polycodified and multiply
grounded-and hence quite difficult to derive from any one definitive
source of authority, unless it is the UN Charter, where the principle is not so
245. Id. at 817-18 (quoting RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF THE FOREIGN RELATIONS LAW OF
THE UNITED STATES § 102(2) (1987)).
246. Id. at 818.
247. Id. at 823 (quoting Black & White Taxicab & Transfer Co. v. Brown & Yellow
Taxicab & Transfer Co., 276 U.S. 518, 533 (1928) (Holmes, J., dissenting)).
248. Id. at 852.
249. Id. at 822 (citing Louis Henkin, InternationalLaw as Law in the United States, 82
MIcH. L. REV. 1555, 1557 (1984)).
250. Id. at 823.
251. Id. at 857 (citing Phillip R. Trimble, A Revisionist View of Customary International
Law, 33 UCLA L. REV. 665, 718-23 (1986)).
252. 304 U.S. 64 (1938).
253. Bradley & Goldsmith, supra note 243, at 852 (quoting Erie, 304 U.S. at 79
(Brandeis, J.)).
much stated as it is a background part of understanding what is stated. 25 4

The same is true of the right to national self-defense. The Charter refers to
it, but in such a way that the prior and independent existence of the right is
assumed ("Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of
individual or collective self-defence .. ."255),
". rather like the U.S.
Constitution refers to habeas corpus ("The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas
Corpus shall not be suspended, unless . . . ."256). So is the Charter the
source and authority for the right of national self-defense? Is the
Constitution the source and authority for habeas corpus--or is it the habeas
statute, or the Magna Carta, or simply the principle that the executive is
under law? And if these questions are difficult to answer, can we honestly
conclude from that difficulty that the rights in view therefore lack
authority? Consider, finally, the last of our trio, the principle of
discrimination. It is nowhere in the Charter and truly does seem to emanate
from state practice and expectation. And yet it's not just out there in the
transcendent ether. It's there in the First Geneva Protocol, and also there in
the handbooks of U.S. military lawyers-who apply it, by the way, in the
course of routine and consequential functions like reviewing plans for U.S.
missile strikes in advance to make sure civilian and military targets are
being adequately distinguished. 257 The principle is not just talk. It appears
to bind.
In the end, none of the major principles at work in the Barrier case are
grounded in a way that would be satisfying to a strict positivist, and yet
none of them seem to lack legal authority or legitimacy. The United States
recently overthrew the government of Iraq; why would it have been
shocking to propose making Iraq the fifty-first state? Because of the
principle of non-annexation. The United States was attacked by Japan in
1941; why couldn't the country have been legally required to do nothing in
response? Because of the principle of national self-defense. And the
United States is currently fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan; why couldn't
we just firebomb any village in which the terrorists might be hiding?
Because of the principle of discrimination. It is just untenable to suggest
254. See supra notes 68-70 and accompanying text. Note that customary international
law isn't necessarily (or even typically) just expectation and state practice; often it is
codified in treaties but taken to apply beyond or exist before those treaties. See
RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF THE FOREIGN RELATIONS LAW OF THE UNITED STATES § 102(3)
(1987) ("International agreements create law for the states parties thereto and may lead to the
creation of customary international law when such agreements are intended for adherence by
states generally and are in fact widely accepted."); see also id. § 102(3) cmts. f, h, i (stating
that certain "multilateral agreements" or a "wide network of similar bilateral arrangements"
can "constitute practice" and thus be treated as "codifying and developing customary law,"
and citing the UN Charter's provisions on the use of force as an example).
255. U.N. Charter art. 51.
256. U.S. CONST. art. I, § 9, cl. 2.
257. See supra notes 191-92, 197 and accompanying text. I'm grateful to Eric Jensen,
former Legal Advisor to U.S. forces in Iraq and Bosnia and former Chief of International
Law for the army's Office of The Judge Advocate General, for the insight about ordinary
military practice.
that there is no law here-and if that is so, perhaps we should revise our
assumptions; perhaps we should regard positivism a little more skeptically,
and customary law (international and otherwise) a little less skeptically,
than we do. The positivist part of the Bradley-Goldsmith argument seems
quite persuasive when taken in the abstract. But that's the problem with
taking it in the abstract. The foundations of the non-annexation, national
self-defense, and discrimination principles are strange-I don't deny that
for an instant-but not strange in a way that deprives them of their authority
825
as law.
So much for the legitimate authority of the law at work in the Barrier
case. What about the legitimate authority of the courts at work in that
case-the ICJ and the Israeli High Court? Now, I would like to focus the
discussion in a certain way here. The classic questions of authority and
legitimacy with regard to courts have to do with jurisdiction and due
process-a court's right to hear a case and the fairness of its procedure for
resolving the case. As to the first, the issue has not been taken up in this
Article, although the literature on the case raises grave doubts concerning
the ICJ's jurisdiction (the Israeli court's jurisdiction seems to have been
unchallenged). 259 As to the second, the issue has been examined in this
Article with respect to fact-finding, and there the ICJ's process proved
258. A caveat: the defense of customary law I have mounted here rests on appreciating
the force of settled practice and expectations for practice, and on a recognition of the
complicated ways in which practice and expectation find their way into more traditional,
textual sources of law. It thus undergirds only the traditional approach to customary
international law reflected in the Third Restatement of Foreign Relations Law: "Customary
international law results from a general and consistent practice of states followed by them
from a sense of legal obligation." RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF THE FOREIGN RELATIONS LAW OF
THE UNITED STATES § 102(2) (emphasis added); see supra note 245 and accompanying text.
Nothing in this argument supports the less restrained approach that would make customary
law of sheer declaration, and indeed much of the analysis throughout this Article-
concerning the disturbing character of many General Assembly resolutions and processes, or
the puzzling aspects of some human rights claims, or the disingenuous commitment patterns
of undemocratic states, or the deep failures in the ICJ's own work-gives reason to view this
latter approach with profound skepticism. See supra notes 23-33, 103-05, 216-17 and
accompanying text; infra notes 263-71 and accompanying text; see also John 0. McGinnis
& Ilya Somin, Should InternationalLaw Be Part of Our Law?, 59 STAN. L. REv. 1175,
1199-201 (2007) (describing the two approaches). There's a larger issue lurking here. The
thrust of the jurisprudential and policy position that is skeptical internationalism is support
for the substance and goals of international law together with skepticism toward international
institutions. But those very institutions are sometimes lawmakers or law-interpreters, or they
try to be, and so there is a need for principles by which to separate the wheat from the chaff
in the body of material that aspires to shape the content of international law. This is a large
task that belongs in another paper, but a focus on practice over simple declaration in the
customary law context is a good start, and a sensitivity to the issue-with careful
consideration in the course of any claim about the content of international law as to whether
the materials supporting that claim can properly qualify as law-is indispensable. See infra
Conclusion.
259. See generally, e.g., Michla Pomerance, The ICJ's Advisory Jurisdiction and the
Crumbling Wall Between the Political and the Judicial, 99 AM. J. INT'L L. 26 (2005). This
was also the focus of Israel's written statement to the ICJ. See Israeli Statement to ICJ, supra
note 10.
sublegal, while the Israeli High Court's showed international law at its
best. 260 But important as these questions are for thinking about the courts'
legitimate authority in the Barrier case, I would like to set them aside; there
is, I think, a deeper question here, one with more general significance for
international law and the international legal system. It is a question of
institutional good faith.
Law is an institutional phenomenon, and one of the least-remarked but
most powerful parts of our expectations for law as law is that it be grounded
in an institutional (usually governmental) setting. The character of this
setting matters. One need not believe that law is what courts do to
recognize that, in litigation, power over law is in courts' hands. So when
we encounter a case in which the court's work falls so far from the mark as
to traverse principles of legality, where that work is not just erroneous but
outrageous, our question finally is whether the court that did the work is an
institution we can trust.26 1 We wonder whether the court is competent and
impartial. Most of all, once we look beyond today's case to what we can
expect tomorrow, we wonder whether the court is structured so as to be
competent and impartial-a reliably trustworthy caretaker of the law. I
indicated earlier that, even in the often technical inquiry into legitimate
authority, certain broadly moral ideas about legitimacy itself are at the end
of the line. 262 One of those ideas is that, if the decisions of our legal
institutions are to have a claim on our allegiance on grounds of legitimate
authority, those institutions must be so constructed as to assure us of some
minimum of institutional good faith.
So: does the Barrier case have anything structural/institutionalto teach
us about the international legal system? I think there are two basic lessons.
First, the ICJ has structural problems that call into question its capacity to
be a trustworthy caretaker of international law. Second, those problems are
not necessary or intrinsic features of the international legal system.
As to the ICJ, what we see in the Barrier case is how singularly unsuited
that court is to perform one of the basic functions of a court in a
majoritarian political structure: protecting the rights of unpopular
minorities. The United Nations is, after all, apart from the Security
Council, a profoundly majoritarian political structure. Each state gets one
vote and one at least putatively equal voice, regardless of its size or power
or wealth, regardless of whether it has any stake in or connection to the
issue in view, and, crucially, regardless of whether it is a rights-respecting
democracy or a tyranny or something in-between. 263 An unpopular country
260. See supra Part I.A. 1, B. 1.

261. See generally, e.g., BUSH v. GORE: THE QUESTION OF LEGITIMACY (Bruce Ackerman
ed., 2002).
263. U.N. Charter art. 2, para. 1 ("The Organization is based on the principle of the
sovereign equality of all its Members."). There is now an important body of scholarship
indicating that democracies do not make war upon each other (the pioneering paper was
Michael W. Doyle, Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, 12 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 205
(1983)) and another indicating that democracies have a distinctive capacity to order their
in this political structure is bound to do badly, an unpopular country

outnumbered by a passionate opposition very badly, and it really should
come as no surprise that the politics of the Barrier case-the confident
activism of the Arab Group and League of Arab States (a lesson in the
voting imbalance when national or cultural groups concentrated in one state
compete with national or cultural groups spanning many states) and the
overwhelming support for that group's efforts within the General Assembly
and Office of the Secretary-General-went as they did.2 64 But all that is
just to say that the United Nations exhibits a feature of democratic
governance familiar to any student of constitutional law-the problem of
the discrete and insular minority-and the situation, exhibiting the familiar
problem, calls for the familiar solution: a court with sufficient judicial
independence to protect minority rights. We speak of the countermajoritarian
problem, but this is the countermajoritarian function. Yet what we have
with the ICJ and what we see in the Barrier case is a court structured not as
a check upon majoritarian politics but as an extension of them.
The problem is a selection process ideally suited for capture by majorities
in the General Assembly and Security Council and by national and regional
state blocs. Candidates for the ICJ are selected by those national and
regional state blocs, on the basis of distributional rules expressly concerned
with cultural representation. 265 The candidates then run for office in the
General Assembly and Security Council; prevail if they receive a majority
vote in both chambers; accede if they win election to nine-year terms of
office; and then can stand for reelection when their terms expire. 266 This is
not a system suited to selecting legal experts and putting them in a position
to neutrally apply the law. It is fundamentally a representative system, and
the empirical evidence indicates that it functions like one. Elections are
reportedly "highly politicized," depend on the support of "influential
states," and (where reelection is at issue) "can focus on cases decided by the
judge." 267 Even an ardent supporter remarks that it "goes without saying
that the whole process of election is accompanied throughout by a
considerable amount of diplomatic negotiation." 26 8 Quantitative study
indicates that "national bias has an important influence on the decision
making of the ICJ," with judges voting for their home states "about 90
percent of the time," or, where their home states are not involved, "states
that are similar to their home states-along the dimensions of wealth,
international relations on the basis of law (discussed throughout Part II.A above). At some
point, given these bodies of work, one cannot but question an international authority so
structured as to make no distinction between types of regimes.
265. See supra note 22.
267. Ruth Mackenzie & Philippe Sands, International Courts and Tribunals and the
Independence of the InternationalJudge, 44 HARv. INT'L L.J. 271, 278-79 (2003).
268. ROSENNE, supra note 22, at 64.
culture, and political regime." 269 In short, a court constructed like the ICJ
should be expected to behave just as the ICJ did in the Barrier case-as the
greater UN's agent. But that is also to say that there are structural reasons
to believe the ICJ will not act on the basis of law when the political winds
blow.
It seems to me that UN supporters owe skeptics an explanation of the
problem of Israel-the problem Israel represents-for there is a larger
question here about whether the United Nations as a whole has a flawed
institutional structure. 2 70 The UN's history with respect to Israel is not an
admirable one, and there has sometimes been in it a predatory quality of the
sort one always sees when an individual faces a group that despises him or
her within a larger group that doesn't much care but would just as soon not
be despised too. 271 Analytically what the Israeli example shows is that the
function of protecting unpopular states within the United Nations has
flowed to the one component of the UN apparatus that is fairly insulated
from majoritarian politics: the permanent, veto-wielding membership of
the Security Council. But the Council is not a legal institution, and its
permanent members, understandably enough, use their vetoes chiefly in the
service of their interests and allies rather than to make sure that
international law is correctly interpreted and applied. Thus there seems to
be no entity positioned to protect minority rights on the basis of law in the
UN structure.
Turning to the Israeli High Court, we see another kind of structural
problem: a national court adjudicating a dispute between its own nation
and a foreign nation. One could imagine that this structural problem would
render national courts, like the international court, incapable of serving as
trustworthy caretakers of the law, at least in cases where significant matters
of national interest or pride are on the line. And we saw how the Israeli
269. Eric A. Posner & Miguel F.P. de Figueiredo, Is the International Court of Justice
Biased?, 34 J. LEGAL STuD. 599, 624 (2005). It would be interesting to see whether the
judges also tend to favor states that are popular within the general UN culture-something
the Posner-Figueiredo study didn't take up, but that the analysis here suggests.
270. Thomas Franck, for example, defending the UN system against Bush Administration
critics, remarks that "[a]t the cutting edge of U.S. policymaking today are persons who have
never forgiven the United Nations for the General Assembly's 1975 resolution equating
Zionism with racism and who ... see the Organization as the implacable foe of Israel and
the United States." Franck, What Happens Now?, supra note 6, at 610. That characterization
seems basically correct, if a little tendentious. But then, having made it, never in the article
does Franck answer his opponents' concerns; never does he defend the UN's conduct toward
Israel (or the United States) as right, and never does he offer a way of relating to the
organization, a coming to terms with it, if that conduct is wrong. He just goes on to other
matters. Id. at 617-18. But then there is no real joinder in the debate. And it is not as
though the concerns are just about the past or come just from the Right. See, e.g., Vaclav
Havel, Op-Ed., A Table for Tyrants, N.Y. TIMES, May 11, 2009, at A23 (condemning as
"farce" the General Assembly's process for electing states to the Human Rights Council, and
charging that the result is a Council run by "human rights abusers" and a betrayal of "victims
of human rights abuses").
court unmistakably identified with its own. 272 But for all that, and in a
setting that must have burned at least as hot in Israel as it did in the UN, the
Israeli High Court decided for the Palestinian side where that side had the
better legal claim. The Barrier case is just one piece of evidence, of course.
But what it suggests is that, although there is a structural problem with
national courts adjudicating international disputes, there is also a structural
solution-the apparatus of judicial independence and the independent
judiciary's familiar habit of holding its own government to account-and
that solution is enough for fair decision making even in situations that test
the limits of realistic judicial forbearance. So it is not true that the
international system has no institutions that can serve as trustworthy
caretakers of the law. In domestic settings, there is a realistic prospect of
the usual courage of an independent court.
2. Law's Moral Rationality
The next question is whether international law in the Barrier case proved
obligatory from the standpoint of moral good sense. Though almost never
expressed directly, I believe that some version of this question is the single
most powerful factor spurring American skepticism toward the international
legal system. It looms behind the doubts that are voiced, the great
unspoken question: can we regard the international legal system's claims as
obligatory in safety? About fifteen years ago, the ICJ addressed in its
advisory capacity the question of whether "the threat or use of nuclear
weapons" necessarily violates international law. 27 3 To its credit, the court
did not state that it does: "[T]he Court cannot conclude definitively
whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful
in an extreme circumstance .... ,,274 But the vote was a tie. 275 Imagine,
then, that the court had ruled the nuclear threat illegal-during the Cold
War, let's say, rather than just after-and imagine that the United States,
regarding that interpretation of international law as obligatory, had
dismantled its nuclear arsenal although the USSR had not. There is at least
a serious argument that that act of compliance would have led to a nuclear
weapon being used (the theory of mutual assured destruction being that the
reciprocal threat of nuclear weapons prevents their use). Or imagine that
the Allies in World War II, taking the principle of discrimination to heart
(and assuming that the principle had been thought applicable at the time),
had not bombed German or Japanese cities-and thus, it is conceivable, lost
the war to the Axis powers. Imagine, in short, that international law
ordered consequences we could never accept-like losing when it matters.
Or, to reverse the perspective, consider the fact that the 1999 NATO
bombings in Serbia and Kosovo, an effort to prevent genocide, are widely

273. Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, Advisory Opinion, 1996 I.C.J.
226, 226 (July 8).
274. Id. at 266.
275. Id.
considered among legal experts, "illegal but, in the circumstances, the right
thing to do." 276 What makes the international law of war unique is that, in
certain situations, a wrong answer threatens consequences more grave than
almost anything else the law might bring about. International law, no less
than constitutional law, is not a suicide pact. Though its project is a moral
one, sovereignty, in the final analysis, is a moral project too-not when
exploited as the claim to be free from all duty, but as the right of a people to
do what it must to live, and the duty of its leaders to do what they must for
their people.
Now, how does international law in the Barrier case fare when this
concern is brought into view? The answer requires that we again
distinguish between international law and international courts. No one who
believes his country to be basically worthwhile and who suspects it to be
out of fashion could endorse subjecting it to the ICJ when the stakes are
high. In the Barrier case, there is no reason to think the ICJ's ruling would
have changed (and the opinion gives no doctrinal basis for a change) if
Israel had shown that, but for the Barrier, terrorists would likely explode a
suitcase nuclear weapon in Tel Aviv. And perhaps there is a lesson in
that-perhaps judges ought to be exposed to the society in which the
consequences of their ruling will fall, as a control on the indifferent, the
frivolous, and the rigid, and an assurance that decision is taken only in
conditions of full investment. That would be another reason to give pride
of place in international law to domestic courts. In any case, the ICJ's work
in the Barrier case shows badly with respect to the creation of a moral
obligation to obey.
International law itself, by contrast, shows quite well, and the Israeli
High Court's ruling nearly as well. Under both, international law imposed
on Israel some measure of sacrifice (the Barrier could not be quite so
effective as it might have been had Palestinian rights counted for nothing at
all) and some measure of sacrifice on the Palestinian side as well (imposing
a degree of territorial burden for the sake of Israel's security). But in
neither case is the sacrifice so great that a supporter of either Israel or
Palestine who is also committed to fairness should wish the judgment
otherwise. Think of it this way: Did the participation of the ICJ in the
Barrier case bring about any of the things we might value international law
for? No. Did the participation of the Israeli High Court applying the same
body of law? Yes, and had the Israeli court proceeded under a slightly
different analysis, the contribution could have been greater still. I can think
of no clearer way to demonstrate the basic point that, in the Barrier case,
international law shows enough moral good sense to deserve our respect.
It is tempting to leave it there, but one final caveat. On what I take to be
a correct reading of international law, the Barrier must remain temporary
whatever happens in the years ahead: the Palestinian people retain the right
276. W. Michael Reisman, Editorial Comment, Assessing Claims To Revise the Law of
War, 97 AM. J. INT'L L. 82, 89 (2003) (citation omitted).
to enjoin Israeli expansion into the territory between the Green Line and the
Barrier, and, if the military threat should fade, to demand that the Barrier be
torn down. But that also means that the Barrier cannot be an instrument of
closure in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. Is that for the best? The United
States and other countries are currently invested in the notion of an
Israeli/Palestinian "peace process." The premise of that process is that
differences can be negotiated and a border one day settled by political
agreement. 277 What if that premise is false? Some people assume, insist,
that conciliation just must be achieved, that anger must be overcome and
neighbors embrace, taking it as an article of faith that these things are
possible the way a faith healer believes he can cure cancer with prayer.
One can hope. But if the hope should fail, the Barrier could become a
substitute for agreement, a settling of the matter for better or worse, one that
might block physically an anger that cannot be extinguished-and if in that
case the Barrier were to become a border, settled enough to bring stability,
we could not sensibly wish the situation disturbed even if illegal and
historically unjust. Nations' borders have never been, in the final analysis,
entirely a matter of law.
Now, in sounding this possibility, I do not want to be too dire. A
political settlement in the Middle East might prove to be possible, and if it
does, international law's refusal to let the Barrier settle the matter will be a
good thing, an affirmation that force does not draw borders. Even if a
political settlement should prove impossible, international law might
surprise us with its flexibility; perhaps it could take into account changed
conditions sufficiently to let an effective physical solution to the conflict
stand. My point is only that international law's moral good sense, even in
the Barrier case, is not without ambiguity.
International law in the Barrier case, then, proves reasonably obligatory,

but not perfectly so; it gives cause for support and also cause for doubt.
The ICJ's decision was lacking from the standpoint of legitimate authority
and also from the standpoint of moral rationality. But the Israeli High
Court's showed better along both lines, and international law itself better
still-and even so there were ambiguities, reasons not to unequivocally
endorse what international law had to offer. On the whole, international
law in the Barrier case, properly interpreted and applied, strikes me as
obligatory. But there are no unqualified answers here.
C. Objectivity
Another part of the skeptical intuition toward international law is the
sense that it falls too much on the politics side of the law/politics distinction
277. See Joshua Kleinfeld, The Problem with "Peace-Process"Politics, NAT'L REV.
ONLINE, Aug. 13, 2002, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-
kleinfeld081302.asp.
to truly qualify as law-and now we are in a thicket, for there is little in

jurisprudence more elusive than that distinction, if it exists, which some
doubt. At the same time, the law/politics distinction is an important part of
the felt experience of law as law and a component of the intuition about
international law, which means there is no avoiding it given the project at
hand. We can get some purchase on the issue, I submit, by means of the
concept of legal objectivity, as developed and contrasted with the concepts
of the partisan and the political in Richard Posner's Supreme Court
Foreword, A Political Court-an article that, in probing constitutional
adjudication in the Supreme Court, in my view probes the nature of law
278
itself.
The question Posner took up in his Foreword was "whether when
deciding constitutional cases the Court should be regarded as essentially a
political body (which is not to say that it is a party animal-'political' does
not equal 'partisan,' as I will explain), exercising discretion comparable in
breadth to that of a legislature." 2 79 Much is said in that way of framing the
question. Already we can see what it means for a court to be
"essentially ... political": it is to exercise discretion of legislative
breadth. 280 And already we are given a useful distinction between being
political and partisan: the latter, Posner explains, is to be "emotionally and
intellectually tied to a particular political party," such that one's factional
loyalties determine the outcome of cases; the former is merely to be
engaged (perhaps inevitably) in the business of resolving cases according to
as open-ended and discretionary a mix of considerations, moral, prudential,
and otherwise, as also determines legislative choices. 281 In Roper v.
Simmons, 282 for example, where the U.S. Supreme Court held
unconstitutional the execution of those under eighteen, the Court
was not interpreting a directive text, hewing to a convincing historical
understanding of the Constitution, or employing apolitical principles of
stare decisis or common law adjudication. It was doing what a legislature
asked to allow the execution of seventeen-year-old
283
murderers would be
doing: making a political judgment.
278. Posner, supra note 20. There's a tendency in American legal culture to take up great
questions of jurisprudence in the context of constitutional law-no surprise that we should
find it here. No surprise as well that certain doubts about whether international law is really
law should also surface in the constitutional law context. There are (as I've remarked a few
times already) parallels between international and constitutional law on this score; the two
tend to disappoint our expectations for law as law in similar ways. See supra pp. 2460, 2491,
2502-03, 2517-18; see also Jack Goldsmith & Daryl Levinson, Law for States:
InternationalLaw, ConstitutionalLaw, Public Law, 122 HARV. L. REv. 1791, 1792 (2009)
(defending the thesis that "constitutional law in fact shares all of the features that are
supposed to make international law so dubious").
279. Posner, supra note 20, at 39.
280. Id.
281. Id. at 75-76. I take it that "partisan" is a subcategory of "political" in this scheme; a
partisan court is also a political court, but a political court is not necessarily a partisan one.
282. 543 U.S. 551 (2005).
283. Posner, supra note 20, at 46-47.
The point holds for most of the Court's constitutional docket, even for "the
most celebrated constitutional decision of modern times, Brown v. Board of
Education," which, "[o]n strictly legal grounds, . . . could have been
284
decided the other way."
What is the alternative to a political court? What would be a
nonpolitical-an essentially legal-court? Posner never answers that
question directly in the article, and his own beliefs on the matter (in light of
his oeuvre on the whole) are complicated and skeptical, 2 85 but one can infer
from the article the conceptual alternative to a political court. "A court is
supposed to be tethered to authoritative texts, such as constitutional and
statutory provisions, and to previous judicial decisions," Posner writes; only 286
a legislature-and this is its distinctive mark-"can roam free."
Elsewhere, he states: "Almost a quarter century as a federal appellate judge
has convinced me that it is rarely possible to say with a straight face of a
Supreme Court constitutional decision that it was decided correctly or
incorrectly." 287 Elsewhere again: "Nonpartisanship," as opposed to
political neutrality, may only be "a halting first step toward objectivity," but
it is at least "an attainable ideal. '288 The constant in all this is the longing
for a universe of correct and incorrect legal answers, for a court engaged in
discovering rather than imposing legal meaning, and for a kind of law that,
though it might not speak for itself, without judges' help, nonetheless takes
pride of place against the judges who announce it. In a word, the hallmark
of a nonpolitical court is objectivity. To be sure, this is not the hard
objectivity of formal logic and mathematics, where every answer is true or
false and there is no room for the virtue (a traditional lawyer's virtue) of
judgment. Posner derides the view "that the typical case the Supreme Court
agrees to decide is a complex puzzle that would take even very bright
people a long time to solve, like designing an airplane" (for
"[i]ndeterminacy . . . is not the same thing as complexity" and thus
"politics" not the same thing as "science"). 2 89 Rather, the objectivity of a
nonpolitical court is the soft objectivity of a legal claim that any reasonable
lawyer would think best, and of a judicial impersonality that aspires to
make judges "just the medium through which law speaks ...the oracles of
290
the law, in Blackstone's phrase."
284. Id. at 47 (citing Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954)). J. Harvie Wilkinson
strikes a similar mood in his critique of the Rehnquist Court's split-the-difference approach
to constitutional adjudication: "Splitting constitutional differences is . . .likely to be
grounded in policy and wisdom," but a more formal methodology "matters supremely in the
law, if it is not to become the kissing cousin of politics." J. Harvie Wilkinson III, The
Rehnquist Court at Twilight: The Lures and Perilsof Split-the-DifferenceJurisprudence,58
STAN. L. REv. 1969, 1989, 1991 (2006).
285. See generally, e.g., RICHARD A. POSNER, OVERCOMING LAW (1995).
287. Id.
288. Id. at 75-76.
289. Id. at 63-64.
290. Id. at 76.
It's not necessary in this Article to defend Posner's view of constitutional

adjudication in the Supreme Court. I just want to borrow his concepts: that
a "political" court is one exercising discretion of legislative breadth; that a
"partisan" court is one loyal to a particular political faction; and that a
nonpolitical court, a court engaged in what can unabashedly be called
"law," is at least in some sense and to some degree objective. My question
here is whether international law in the Barrier case proved to be partisan,
political, or objective.
I find it almost impossible to review the ICJ's work in the Barrier case
without suspecting the court of an ideological commitment to the
Palestinian (and General Assembly) cause-without suspecting it, that is, of
precisely what Posner meant by partisanship. But judicial partisanship is a
weighty accusation to make and a difficult one to prove, and it can be a
mark of maturity in the law to resist that sort of thing. Aharon Barak would
have us resist it. With a knowing and deliberate naivet6, he acknowledges
nothing but the juridical surface, insisting that the differences between his
court's decision and the ICJ's arose straightforwardly from their different
291
factual foundations-an unremarkable disagreement among professionals.
There's something dignified about this sort of forbearance; a distinguished
constitutionalist once said to me, "Barak does not think the ICJ is anti-Israel
and I cannot help thinking it is. But that is why he is a great man." And of
course, much that is disturbing in the ICJ's opinion-the failure to
scrutinize claims of fact or reason about claims of law, the crusading tone,
the sense of being recruited to a cause 292-is deniable or amenable to a
more or less innocent interpretation.
Yet much as we might hesitate to fling the accusation of judicial
partisanship recklessly and in anger, we also should not play the fool, and in
this case, there are two factors that warrant a negative conclusion. First,
the factual grounds for Israel's security claims were concealed, and
concealed by means of a process that violated elementary principles of
legality. 293 There is (as another justice on Israel's High Court put it) an
"ignoring" of Palestinian violence, "a silence that the reader cannot help
noticing-a foreign and strange silence." 294 Second, the legal conditions
291. See HCJ 7957/04 Mara'abe v. Prime Minister of Isr. [2005], translatedin 45 I.L.M.
202, 226 (2006) ("The main difference between the two judgments [Beit Sourik and Legal
Consequences] stems primarily from the difference in the factual basis upon which each
court made its decision. Once again, the simple truth is proven: the facts lie at the
foundation of the law, and the law arises from the facts (exfactojus oritur).").
292. See supra Part I.A.
293. See supra Part I.A.1, especially the text accompanying notes 61-62.
294. Mara'abe, 45 I.L.M. at 244-45 (Cheshin, Vice President, concurring). The rest of
the concurrence is also lovely (Mishael Cheshin, now retired, was the Israeli court's most
noted stylist) and resonates in theme with this paper: "[W]hen I was a young student," he
writes, "Public International Law was not seen ...as worthy of the title 'law', and the
institutions of the international community, including the International Court of Justice,
received the same treatment. The years passed, and public international law got stronger and
began to stand on its own two feet as a legal system .... " But in the ICJ's work on the
for asserting a right of national self-defense were manipulated, and the

manner of that manipulation again violated elementary principles of
legality. 295 Where calm reason shows a court to have behaved in ways that
both undermine the character of law as law and can only be rationally
interpreted as serving the interests of a political faction or party to the case,
it is no service to the law to excuse the court. Barak is like a judicial Don
Quixote, refusing to see the homeliness in his plain mistress. But don't
Cervantes's readers know the joke and get to laugh? In the end, the Barrier
case in the ICJ's hands was not law but politics by other means-and it is
not finally a mark of greatness to pretend otherwise.
Turning now to the Israeli High Court of Justice and Barak's own
opinion on the Barrier, the conclusion is quite different. . What finally
makes Barak's achievement significant is not that he ignored the
partisanship in the ICJ's work, but that he rose above partisanship in his
own. His Barrier opinion neither championed Israel's interests nor indulged
the contrarian temptation to prove his own virtue by championing the
interests of Israel's opponent. Barak rose above the partisanship of having
allies and opponents, in a situation that. would strain a saint's capacity for
fairness. That was dignified. But although nonpartisan, Barak's work was
political in exactly the sense Posner uses the term when he speaks of
"exercising discretion comparable in breadth to that of a legislature. 29 6
Both the selection and application of the principle of proportionality were
acts of essentially untethered choice, acts that left the universe of
determinate legal answers far behind and that reflected Barak's judicial
personality rather than something that could reliably be expected of another
judge no less skillful and no less fair. 297 In the end, what the principle of
proportionality amounted to in Barak's hands was a legally decorous way of
saying: • Is this the right thing to do? Is it worth it? Or to put the point
differently, Barak's judgment call was much like the one a legislature
would have made in deciding how to route the Barrier. "Strip Roper v.
Simmons of its fig leaves," Posner wrote, "and you reveal a naked political
judgment. '29 8 .I would not go quite that far here. But close.
Yet political as the Barrier courts were, the law was not. A judicial
decision can be political because of its nature or because of the judges who
decided it; the problem can be a vice of professional character or an
incompleteness in the system. I do not think there is an incompleteness in
the system in the Barrier case. There is law here; the stuff of objectivity is
here. If one accepts the opening position that the Israeli/Palestinian
situation is international in nature, that a sustained, violent, territorial
dispute between two international entities qualifies as armed conflict, and
Barrier, "I could not discover those distinguishing marks which turn a document into a legal
opinion or a judgment of a court." Id. at 244-45.
296. Supra note 279 and accompanying text.
that the Israeli High Court's fact-finding was sound, it follows as a matter
of law that: (1) building the Barrier within the West Bank was militarily
necessary and therefore not an annexation, but, on the same legal grounds,
(2) the Barrier was subject to, and violated, the requirement that weapons
used in wartime discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. Or
so I have argued. 299 The objectivity here is "soft," of course; it is not like
the objectivity of mathematics. But there are grounds on which to stand
and say, "This ruling, and no other, should as a matter of law carry the
day." It is no small victory for international law that it can provide such a
ruling in even as novel, intricate, and fraught a situation as the Barrier case.
I am aware, of course, that even a hint of objectivism about the law (and,
with it, essentialism about the law/politics distinction) runs contrary to deep
currents in contemporary legal thought. But I do not mean to suggest that
every legal question has a determinate answer-only that many do, and that
in the remainder, objectivity in the next case can be the output of a good
legal opinion in this one. That is, objectivity is something that we as
lawyers should aspire to bring about, and can bring about through norms of
legal craftsmanship and an extreme but not impossible degree of self-
restraint, which in ideal form would become a sort of judicial self-
abnegation, or if that is too much, a multiple empathy so inclusive that the
self would dissolve in it. I also do not mean to suggest a rigid distinction
between law and politics, as if the two were made of different substances,
like history and physics. Law is frozen politics, the network of political
settlements of the past that, having been integrated with other such
settlements, determinately answers a surprising number of questions, and
creates a backdrop from which we can snatch a little social peace out of
what would otherwise be perpetual and limitless dispute. Finally, I submit
that there is something cavalier about disdaining the aspiration to legal
objectivity altogether. It is a false sophistication, which does not comport
with the experience of most law most of the time, and which robs law of its
social function-to render our communal life a little more detached and
decent, to give us a little shelter from the political struggle. Law at its best
is a counterpolitical force.
The conclusion, then, is that the courts that contended with the Barrier
case were political, but that international law itself need not be. The
problem is not in the doctrine but in the application function. In a word, it
is a problem of personnel. And on a personal note, that has been the
conclusion of my experience of domestic law as well-a conclusion I never
anticipated, never dreamed could be true. It is the judges that fail us.
CONCLUSION: SKEPTICAL INTERNATIONALISM
Nothing intrinsic to international law deprives it of the character of law.

In operation it can and often does fail of its promise, but the failure is with
the courts charged with interpreting and applying the law, not with the law
299. See supra Part I.C.

itself. That, anyway, is what this Article's analysis of the law and courts at
work in the Barrier case suggests. I would like now to draw some broader
conclusions from that analysis, but a caveat-connected to this Article's
extensive reliance on a single case-is in order first.
One basic line of discussion in this Article has focused on the operation
of international law and the international legal system; the other basic line
of discussion has focused on philosophical issues about law itself. Drawing
so heavily on a single case seems to me to do no great harm to the
philosophical side of the analysis; that stands or falls on its theoretical
merit, and there's no particular problem (and in my view some virtue) with
its touching off from a close engagement with a case. But as to general
claims about international law and the international legal system, drawing
so heavily on one case is a substantial limitation, and indeed, the very
features that make this particular case so interesting-its high stakes and its
peculiar grip on ideological and identity-based passion 30 0 -may also make
it an unduly difficult test for the international legal system today. Perhaps
that system would show better with almost any other issue; perhaps the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict is just too much for it in the present order of
things. In any case, I take it that this Article can only be suggestive on the
international side of the analysis. That said, I'd like now to make one broad
point about jurisprudence and offer one broad proposal about international
law and the international legal system.
First the jurisprudence. To ask the question this Article asks-whether
international law is law properly so called-is to subscribe by implication
to a certain view of law itself. There is no question that the agencies of
international law, like the ICJ, are constituted bodies purportedly and
officially engaged in the work of law. To imply that their work might not
be law despite its formal trappings is to say that the formal trappings of the
law are not enough, that what we think of as "law" is more complicated
than simply the observation that a court or legislature is speaking. Law is
activity under a certain set of values, and to the extent those values are
absent, the activity is not law at all-that is, not just bad law, but, because
values are constitutive of the kind of thing law is, non-law. Philosophers
have developed the notion of "thick ethical concepts" to talk about terms
that break the boundary between facts and values-concepts like "cruel" or
"brave" that can be wielded correctly in description only if one first takes
up an evaluative point of view. 30 1 The term "law" is like those thick ethical
concepts. One could say the same thing about "democracy" or "art." The
social world just seems to generate these kinds of mutually evaluative and
descriptive ontological objects.
For what is the alternative? One would have to think that anything a
judge does under the mantle of his office is law just because a judge is
300. See supra pp. 2456-57.

301. See HILARY PUTNAM, THE COLLAPSE OF THE FACTNALUE DICHOTOMY AND OTHER
ESSAYS 28-45 (2002).
doing it. But if a judge issued a ruling that was a sheer act of will-utterly
without legal foundations, ungrounded in any procedural context,
impossible to enforce, and irrational besides-could anyone really claim
that ruling to be an act or artifact of law? People like Hart think it muddies
the waters to define law with moral values inside-but what about the non-
moral values, like efficacy, or the quasi-moral ones, like objectivity? To
my mind, when an activity that pretends to law falls below some floor with
respect to law's constitutive values, it simply becomes an activity of a
different sort, no more law than is a tennis game in which the players
happen to be judges. Christine Korsgaard calls this sort of phenomenon
"self-constitution" and associates it with normativity itself.30 2 Surely it is
something like this that Lon Fuller had in mind when he described law as
"an object of human striving" rather than "a datum projecting itself into
human experience" and wrote that "[i]f laws, even bad laws, have a claim to
our respect, then law must represent some general direction of human effort
that we can understand and describe, and that we can approve in principle
even at the moment when it seems to us to miss its mark. '303 In any case,
these implications are fused with the very question that has spurred this
study.
If this is true, then sometimes (no doubt rarely) an act or artifact or
enterprise that purports to be law, and comes clothed in the law's formal
trappings, will prove upon scrutiny to be something else-and that means
something for how we as a legal community should receive that act or
artifact or enterprise. For example, certain attempts within the United
Nations to alter the content of customary international law by aspirational
declaration alone should in my view be observed under a different category
than "law" and treated with some skepticism. 30 4 Or to take an example
close to home, I submit that the ICJ's Barrier opinion, not exhibiting the
features necessary to law as law, is not law, and thus cannot be treated as a
legal source. In other words, given the analysis defended above-that the
ICJ's Barrier opinion cut so many of the threads that bound it to the sphere
of law as to pass out of that sphere altogether-it simply follows that the
opinion cannot serve as legal authority. It is therefore improper to cite the
opinion as support for any claim as to what the content of international law
is. And while I think this conclusion has a certain logical necessity, I also
think it is healthy for the legal community to hold seriously errant courts to
account in this way-for when judges transgress their duties, there are very
few tools available with which to contain and repair the damage done or to
sanction and deter the wrong. Our duty to the law, as a legal community,
302. KORSGAARD, supra note 19, at 28, 32 (explaining at the level of metaphysics what it
means for a thing's "teleological organization" to give rise to self-constituting "normative
standards"--that is, "standards that apply to a thing simply in virtue of its being the kind of
thing that it is"--and likewise what it means for an activity's "directed" character to give
rise to "constitutive principles" such that "if you are not guided by the principle, you are not
performing the activity at all").
303. See Fuller, supra note 119, at 632, 646.
requires that we not be too deferential to seriously irresponsible judges.

Now, were the ICJ's decision compulsory rather than advisory, were it
binding as a formal matter, a different conclusion might be warranted; that
situation would raise issues not addressed here. But the ICJ's opinion was
advisory, which means any power it has depends on its ability to gain entrre
into the evolving canon of international public law. it is both logical and
reasonable to deny it that.
Now for the broad (suggestive) proposal as to the international legal
system as a whole. The proposal touches off from the observation of the
gap between international law as it is and international law as it could be,
between the potential of the law and the failures of the courts. "Skeptical
internationalism" names a stance toward the international legal system. It is
skeptical in that it rejects the sort of boosterism one finds among certain
ardent international law activists, who often seem taken with the
international system more because of the things it says about itself than how
it functions, and who seem to treat the United Nations and its organs as
sources of super-legitimacy and to identify the cosmopolitan project with
the project of morality itself. The system in operation is much too ugly and
much too troubled for all that, and the skeptic notices the failings and
doesn't hold his tongue. But skeptical internationalism is internationalist in
that it regards the aspiration to order international life by law in such a way
that certain wrongs of the past become less likely to recur as both
magnificent and not consistently unrealistic-and therefore as deserving
our fidelity. If we believe that legitimate state power is power under law,
the corollary should be that there are certain things governments should not
be allowed to do anywhere, to anyone. And much of the doctrinal material
international law has developed to that end is sound and can be a source of
justice.
In short, the skeptical internationalist is a skeptic toward international
institutions but a friend to international law itself. The message, in effect,
is, "True faith, false church." With that message, the shadow over one
corner of the international legal system darkens, but over another corner
lifts.

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Fordham Law Review

Volume 78 Issue 5 Article 11

Skeptical Internationalism: A Study of Whether International Law

Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr

Part of the Law Commons

Cover Page Footnote

This article is available in Fordham Law Review: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol78/iss5/11

* Research Fellow, Normative Orders Cluster of Excellence, Goethe University Frankfurt

INTRODUCTION: THE QUESTION AND THE CASE

1. JOHN AUSTIN, THE PROVINCE OF JURISPRUDENCE DETERMINED 30-31, 117, 122-24,

argument from ideology: "International law promises to advance such

surprise, and the opportunity to build reflections of a general nature up from

11. Advisory Opinion, 2004 I.C.J. 136 (July 9).

extraordinary outpouring of passionate violence. The violence has centered

17. THUCYDIDES, supra note 7, § 1.76.

20. Richard A. Posner, The Supreme Court, 2004 Term-Foreword: A PoliticalCourt,

I. PRINCIPLES OF LEGALITY AND THE BARRIER BETWEEN ISRAEL AND THE

A. The InternationalCourt ofJustice in the BarrierCase

findings of fact in instances of dispute is scarcely less remarkable or

measures taken are bound 43nonetheless to remain in conformity with

43. Id. at 195.

56. Report PreparedPursuantto ES-10/13, supra note 29, 4.

61. See supra text accompanying notes 23-33.

legally, in that the conquest was understood to work a transfer of title. 68 At

71. Legal Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at 182.

suggestion is that the Barrier might change facts on the ground

85. See infra Part I.C.

"work," "the enjoyment of just and favourable conditions of work," "an

wall has led to the destruction or requisition of properties under conditions

97. Legal Consequences, 2004 I.C.J. at 189.

humanitarian law). 103 Conditions of application, definitions, precedents

108. U.N. Charter art. 51.

historically, at least on a long view of history, since state-based political

defense applies only between states? There's really no answer to that

117. Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian

A "general disregard of the terms of the laws they purport to enforce"

B. The Israeli High Court of Justice in the BarrierCase

1. Principles of Legality and Finding Facts

132. Id. at 831, translatedin 43 I.L.M. at 1109.

Palestinian side began a campaign of terror," which, by April 2004,

137. Id. at 814-15, translatedin 43 I.L.M. at 1099.

Barak's next move is to posit proportionality as the universal principle of

153. Id. at 836, translatedin 43 I.L.M. at 1113.

military commander "must create an arrangement which will avoid this

159. Id. at 856, translatedin 43 I.L.M. at 1125.

C. The Possibilityof Law in the BarrierCase

1. The Opening Position

166. See supra notes 68-70 and accompanying text.

"two-state solution." 16 7 Security Council Resolutions have effectively

171. See supra text accompanying notes 108-17.

174. See supra notes 131-33, 146-49 and accompanying text.

combat, where "[t]hroughout the sets of specific rules . . . policies of

176. McDOUGAL & FELICIANO, supranote 70, at 521.

"convenience, expediency, and interest"; 183 second, required that the

183. McDOUGAL & FELICIANO, supra note 70, at 678.

188. See supra notes 169-70 and accompanying text.

194. See supra Part I.B.2.

II. INTERNATIONAL LAW AND LAW'S SELF-CONSTITUTING VALUES

200. Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 349 U.S. 294, 301 (1955).

204. See supra note 18 and accompanying text.