What's Left? (Review of International Law on the Left: Re-Examining Marxist Legacies (Susan Marks, ed. 2008)
23 Pages Posted: 26 Jul 2012
Date Written: 2011
Abstract
In response to the American invasion of Iraq, a group of prominent European legal scholars convened a symposium to explore the causes of the “material economic woes of international society.” A revised and expanded version of that Symposium, including five new essays, was published by Cambridge, International Law on the Left: Re-examining the Marxist Legacies (Susan Marks, ed. 2008).
In What’s Left? I review the provocative, scholarly, and occasionally electrifying essays in this volume in two parts, each addressing a version of the question, “What’s Left?” Part I asks, “What‘s ‘Left?” That is, is there a coherent Left in international law and, if so, what does it look like? Part II asks, “What’s left?” in the sense, “What remains?” This Part has two sections. First, what remains of the Marxist legacies after the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Union? Second, more poignantly, “What’s left?” of what Martti Koskenniemi calls “international law’s emancipatory promise?”
The global economic crisis makes this review especially timely. As the President promises to reduce economic inequality, this rigorous reassessment of Marxism by a new generation of theorists is both useful and illuminating.
Keywords: Human Rights Law, International Law, Jurisprudence
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