INTERNATIONAL LAW, WORLD ORDER, AND HUMAN PROGRESS

My friends in the legal profession like to remind me of a
comment by a British Judge on the difference between lawyers
and professors. "It's very simple," said Lord Denning, "The
function of lawyers is to find a solution to every difficulty presented
to them; whereas the function of professors is to find a difficulty
with every solution."

To-day,
the number of difficulties seems to be outpacing
the number of solutions -- that is either because there are too
many professors in government, or
my lawyer friends are not
working hard enough.

Law and lawyers have played a seminal role in American
public life since the founding of the Republic. In this century
lawyers have been consistently at the center of diplomacy --

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providing many of our ablest Secretaries of State and diplomats,
and often decisively influencing American thinking about foreign
policy.

This is no accident. The aspiration to harness the conflict
of nations into paths of order and justice runs deep in the American
tradition. In pioneering techniques of arbitration, conciliation, and
adjudication; in developing and encouraging international
institutions and economic practices; and in a body of scholarship
sketching visions of world order -- American legal thinking has
reflected both American idealism and American pragmatic genius.
The problem-solving skills of American lawyers have been
a great creative force in our diplomacy.

Today we face problems of world structure that summon
these creative skills and yet go beyond them. The rigid

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international structure of the Cold War has disintegrated; we have
entered an era of diffused economic power, proliferating nuclear
weaponry, and multiple ideologies and centers of initiative. The
challenge of our predecessors was to recover stability from
chaos. The challenge of our generation is to go from the building
of national +regional institutions+ and the
management of crises to the building of a new international order
which offers a hope of peace, progress, well being and justice
for the generations to come.

In this enterprise international law must play a vital role.

Justice Holmes said of the common law that it "is not a brooding
omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign
or quasi-sovereign power which can be identified." But international politics recognizes
no sovereign or even quasi-sovereign power beyond the nation state.

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Thus the age-old struggle between order and anarchy
has in international affairs a political as well as a legal
competing
dimension. When national political aims are pressed
to the point of unconstrained competition, the precious
restraints of law prove fragile. The quest for predominance
brooks no legal restraints. In a democratic society law flourishes
best amidst pluralistic institutions. Similarly in the international
arena stability requires an equilibrium of power. Negotiation,
accommodation, nurturing habits of restraint - these are the
immediate objectives of diplomacy.

Our basic foreign policy objective must be to shape a stable and
more cooperative global order out of diverse and untending
interests. But preoccupations with interests and power is at best sterile
and at worst an invitation to a constant test of aims. No international

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order can be permanent without the strengthening fabric of law.

The ultimate task of statesmanship is to draw from the balance of power a more positive capacity to better the human condition -- to turn stability into creativity, to transform the relaxation of tensions into a strengthening of freedoms, to turn man's energies from

defense to progress.

In this quest international law both provides a means and embodies our ends. It is at once a body of principles drawn from the practice of states and an instrument for fashioning new patterns of relations between states. Law is an expression of our own culture and yet a symbol of universal goals. It is a repository of both our experience and our idealism. It is the