DRAFT

8/8/75

INTERNATIONAL LAW, WORLD ORDER, AND HUMAN PROGRESS

Address to the American Bar Association Annual Convention

Montreal, Canada - August 11, 1975

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." The number of difficulties seems to be outpacing the number of solutions -- so I urge my lawyer friends to try harder.

I want to speak to you today about the link between international law and contemporary foreign policy. Law and lawyers have played a seminal role in American public life since the founding of the Republic.

In this century you have played an especially important role in American diplomacy -- providing so many of our Secretaries of State and diplomats,

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and influencing so much of American thinking about foreign policy. You
and we -- lawyers and policymakers -- have much to learn from each
other, in a new era that summons our creativity and vision as never before.

Lawyers pride themselves on technical skill, on mastering facts and
marshalling arguments, on precision of thought and practicality of mind.
But the work of the policymaker is by its nature more conjectural. Statesmen
must make decisions on the basis of assessments that cannot be proved
when they are made. If they wait for certainty, they usually relinquish
the chance to shape the course of events. The intangibles of will,
the long-term trends of political consciousness -- and most importantly --
the realities of power, impinge on the world in which the statesmen
must act.

The aspiration to harness the conflict of nations into patterns of
order and justice based on law goes very deep in the American tradition.
In pioneering techniques of arbitration, conciliation, and adjudication;
in helping to found the United Nations;

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in encouraging the institutions of European unity and in developing international
economic arrangements and practices; and in a body of scholarship sketching
visions of world order -- 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.

But today we face problems of world structure that both summon these
creative skills and go beyond them. The Cold War international order -- of
rigid military confrontation between two blocs -- has now irrevocably broken
down; we have entered an era of diffused economic power, proliferating
nuclear weaponry, and multiple ideologies and centers of initiative. A
world in flux now challenges us to build
a new stable pattern of order to replace the old, to offer a hope of peace and
well being for the next generation.

In this enterprise the perspectives of the lawyer and
the policymaker are both required; both must be joined together

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for a common effort. We must find concrete solutions to
immediate problems; yet we must understand the basic forces
at work -- historical, economic, political -- that drive
a world of change.

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 the international community has not yet
reached the stage of its development when the nations of
the world are prepared to recognize any international voice as
sovereign or even quasi-sovereign. On the international plane,
compared to the flourishing of the Anglo-American legal tradition,
the world is still at an early stage of social evolution.

The struggle between order and anarchy on a global
scale is thus political as well as legal. Where national
political aims are pressed to the point of unconstrained
international rivalry, the precious restraints of law prove

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fragile. Just as within a democratic society law flourishes best in an environment of pluralistic institutions, in the international arena equilibrium of power is the minimum requirement of stability. Negotiation, accommodation, nurturing habits of restraint -- these are the immediate objectives of diplomacy. A more effective common law, a more effective international law, if it is to come about, will be formed not out of a pure impartiality but from a compromise of interests and deepening patterns of conduct.

In our foreign policy therefore our basic objective is to shape a stable and more cooperative global order out of the pluralism of the international environment. But no such order can be built or have permanence without the strengthening fabric of law. For the true task of statesmanship is to draw from the sterile balance of power a more positive capacity to better the human condition -- to turn stability