A Journal of the Voyage from Apology to Utopia

Abstract

… fulfilment of my first ambition – to describe international law in a way that would resonate with practitioner experience – necessitated that I resist the pull of either excessive “formalism” or excessive policy-oriented “realism”. In the course of writing, however, I began to realise that this way of stating the problem also contained the seeds of its resolution … I needed to think about my own experience as far from idiosyncratic and to examine the contrast between “formalism” and “realism” as an incident of the standard experience of any international lawyer in the normal contexts of academy or practice.