Foundations of International Law Conference

The point of this conference is to examine some of the fundamental philosophical concepts on which modern debates in international law are founded. While many conferences in international law have examined such questions, inter alia, our hope in this conference is to gather a group of scholars who are either philosophers or who take a particular interest in philosophical method to return to basics in this area, and treat the classic problems of international law as a series of problems in political and moral philosophy. Among the questions we will consider are the following:

What is the meaning of sovereignty in the international context, and are States properly speaking sovereign entities? What is the normative force of customary international law, and what philosophical accounts in meta-ethics or political philosophy would best support such force? How should we treat defectors from international treaty agreements, and how should our analysis of such defectors compare with defectors from domestic social contracts? What is the normative status of jus cogens with respect to human rights? Does the idea of global justice include a global distributive principle? How should we understand problems of collective action that arise in the international arena, for example in the context of natural resource law and climate change? Under what authority can individuals be prosecuted under international law, and are such prosecutions merely political in force, or do they reflect the rule of law? Must one be a natural law theorist to see international law generally as having normative force, or are various versions of positivism in keeping with the idea of international law as well?