I Hate International Law Scholarship (Sort of)

ESSAYS I loathe international law scholarship for much the same reasons David Byrne hates world music. Music might seem an odd pairing with international law. And certainly David Byrne (rock musician, member of the former band, "Talking Heads," and now manager of his own record label) is an especially peculiar companion for me in this meditation on what is wrong with international law as an academic discipline. But in a recent article in The New York Times,1 Byrne lays out his appraisal of world music-what it is, what it has come to mean, and how the idea of multicultural and international sound has come to be perverted and distorted in the global marketplace of art and business. It is a powerful critique. It is all the more so since Byrne has been closely identified with world music, and he has been active in introducing American (meaning Western, parochial, and narrow-eared) audiences to the pleasures, nuances, and challenges of foreign and alternative music. In a similar vein, it might be regarded as strange for me to criticize international legal scholarship so openly since I have spent much of my professional life as a selfavowed academic, international lawyer, and advocate for the advancement of the role of international law in the United States. Teaching public international law has been central to my professional identity. But, just as David Byrne has become disenchanted with what world music has come to mean in the marketplace of sound, I have grown disillusioned with how the currency of international legal scholarship has come to be traded in the bazaar of ideas. This essay makes a very modest attempt to connect the problems of globalization in music with the internationalization of law. But, it also goes one step further to catalogue the pathologies-what I call here "the deadly sins"-that afflict current international legal scholarship as it struggles for a place in the legal academy, in the councils of power, and in the public square. I A close reading of David Byrne's contribution in The New York Times would quickly indicate that he is a master of conceit and artistic misdirection. Indeed, he does not hate world music at all. He just despises how world music has come to be portrayed and caricatured in a domestic musical aesthetic. Moreover, he fears how those who compose, play, and market world music have come to pander to a musical fashion and sensibility that actually despises and belittles what they do. I share these same visceral reactions and fears for international law scholarship. World music has become, according to Byrne, merely a "name for a bin in the record store signifying stuff that doesn't belong anywhere else in the store."2 In the same way, as international law has developed as a distinct and separate discipline within the American legal academy in the past century, it, too, has acquired a reputation for being a catch-all for forms of law and legal thinking that cannot be comfortably positioned in a construct of domestic law. International law scholarship has, almost by default, become legal writing and study that does not belong anywhere else. This sense of separation, of 11 otherness," is manifested in both the process of how international law scholarship is generated and how it is presented to its audience. International legal scholarship, like world music, has thus been relegated to a "ghetto."3 Consider David Byrne's concerns for world music: the use of the term world music is a way of dismissing artists or their music as irrelevant to one's own life. It's a way of relegating this "thing" into the realm of something exotic and therefore cute, weird but safe, because exotica is beautiful but irrelevant; they are, by definition, not like us. Maybe that's why I hate the term. It groups everything and anything that isrA "us" into "them."4 This pathology in the appreciation of world music is symptomatic of a larger illness that has come as a byproduct of globalization and multiculturalism. …