The Imbalance of the International Law System

My first acquaintance with law was when I started to read it as a freshman at Cambridge in October 1932. The first year then included, besides much Roman law, a course on “international relations” which still seems to me was a sensible preparation for international law in the second year. So I have been dealing with international law during a fair slice of the last hundred years. When I started on international law, I discovered that there were doubts whether it was properly “law” at all. The “jurisprudence” lecturer, who taught Austin, did not encourage respect for international law, and the then Cambridge international lawyers – with the exception of Arnold McNair – tended to be on the defensive. This was disturbing because, as a naïve “Mr.Verdant Green,” it had not even occurred to me that law professors might teach a law that was not law; until I heard one of them defending it, and that made me wonder. After all, at that time and on up to the end of the Second World War, international law was, like the leading text book, in two volumes. The international law of peacetime was in volume I. But any state might, in its sovereign discretion, declare war on another. Then one put volume I back on the shelf and took down volume II with its rules about war and neutrality. It is now not always easy to remember that this situation, give or take various feeble attempts at change, was the position until 1946.