The Misery Of International Law: Confrontations With Injustice In The Global Economy PDF
Preview The Misery Of International Law: Confrontations With Injustice In The Global Economy
THE MISERY OF INTERNATIONAL LAW The Misery of International Law Confrontations with Injustice in the Global Economy JOHN LINARELLI, MARGOT E SALOMON, and MUTHUCUMARASWAMY SORNARAJAH 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © John Linarelli, Margot E Salomon, and Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah 2018 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. 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John dedicates this book to his wife Lina, who knows a lot about justice, and to his son John Shih Shin, whose generation will have to deliver it. Margot dedica questo libro, con amore e gratitudine, al suo marito, alla loro figlia e sua Nonna. Sorna dedicates this book to Ahila. John Linarelli is Professor of Commercial Law at Durham University, co-directs the Institute for Commercial and Corporate Law at Durham, and is a member of the Centre for Law and Global Justice at Durham. Margot E Salomon is Associate Professor in the Department of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the interdisciplinary Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy at LSE Human Rights. Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah is CJ Koh Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore. Preface This book started as an idea discussed over dinner after a lecture by M Sornarajah (‘Sorna’) at an event on 31 October 2013 at the LSE Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy entitled, ‘Greed, Humanity and the Neoliberal Retreat in International Law’. Sorna gave the lecture and John and Margot were commentators, the latter also the convener. The dinner conversation after the event was very much in the mold of ‘we really do approach the issues in very different ways but usually reach similar conclusions’, even if we disagreed on the central point as to whether there was in fact a neoliberal retreat in international law! The conversation moved to how stimulating, albeit challenging, a book co-authored by the three of us would be to write. We agreed to write it anyway and met for many absorbing afternoons to discuss, debate, and rediscover the topics and approaches that have animated our separate scholarship and would be developed in a collective work interrogating the problems of socio-economic injustice found in contempor- ary international law. We think our willingness to take a chance has paid off with a book we hope you, dear reader, will find as engaging to read as it was to write. John Linarelli is a legal scholar with longstanding interests in taking the philosophical literature on global justice to the next step of making it more sensitive to institutional design, focusing his work on moral questions relevant to the institutional architecture for the global economy. He also works in the political economy tradition. Margot Salomon is a human rights law scholar focusing on legal dimensions of world poverty and on international law and development. Her work falls within a tradition of applied critical theory, if the concept of ‘tradition’ suits the varied counter-hegemonic approaches her scholarship takes on. Sorna is a pre-eminent international invest- ment law scholar, having written both textbooks and definitive works on invest- ment law problems facing low and middle-income countries. Sorna was very much present at the earliest days of the New International Economic Order. So, in this book you will find a rich disciplinary mix of international law, economics, history, moral philosophy, political economy, and critical development studies. We have avoided labels such as ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘multidisciplinary’ for this work and will let readers decide if this methodological point requires an answer. What was of interest to us, from our very first conversations in that London restaurant, was how we were going to go about normatively critiquing the regimes of international law relevant to the global economy. It was our conviction, then as now, that inter- national law must be evaluated for the ways in which it fails to respect the lives of persons harmed by the global economic order that it helps constitute. We have viii Preface sought to expose some tall tales and accepted wisdom, and to make visible and cen- tral the disenfranchised of international law. To these ends, we saw our divergent approaches as a challenge to be embraced and not an obstacle to be overcome. We hope our book engages you, calls some settled convictions into question, and even generates disagreements so necessary for scholarly debate eventually to work itself into law and policy. John, Margot, and Sorna December 2017 Contents 1. The Legal Rendering of Immiseration 1 2. Confronting the Pathologies of International Law: From Neoliberalism to Justice 38 3. The End of Empire and the Search for Justice: NIEO and Beyond 78 4. International Trade: From War Capitalism to Contracts of Distribution 110 5. Foreign Investment: Property, Contract, and Protecting Private Power 145 6. Global Finance: Riches for the Few; Harm for the Many 175 7. Human Rights: Between the Radical and the Subverted 226 8. In Lieu of a Conclusion 271 Select Bibliography 275 Index 305
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