Enforcing International Law: States, IOs, and Courts as Shaming Reference Groups

86 Pages Posted: 13 Mar 2013 Last revised: 11 Oct 2015

See all articles by Sandeep Gopalan

Sandeep Gopalan

University of Maryland Eastern Shore - School of Business and Technology

Roslyn Fuller

INSYTE Interdisciplinary Research Group

Date Written: March 13, 2013

Abstract

We seek to answer the question as to whether international law imposes meaningful constraints on state behaviour. Unabated drone strikes by the dominant superpower in foreign territories, an ineffective United Nations, and persistent disregard for international law obligations, as evidenced by states killing their own citizens, all suggest that the sceptics have won the debate about whether international law is law and whether it affects state behaviour. We argue that such a conclusion would be in error because it grossly underestimates the complex ways in which IL affects state behaviour. We argue that scholars who claim that the lack of coercive power in IL is fatal to it being law err in imagining that the types of physical coercion typically used in domestic law enforcement are the only types of coercion available for the enforcement of legal rules. Incarceration is not the only type of coercion available for the enforcement of legal rules. To be sure, depriving the offender of his liberty by locking him up in jail has severe expressive, deterrent, retributive, and incapacitative effects, but that does not itself lead to the conclusion that other punishments cannot achieve the same purposes and be just as coercive. If these alternative punishments can be shown to achieve the aforementioned effects, the central argument against IL being law falls. We aim to do this by focusing on a relatively neglected kind of sanction in IL – shaming. We show that IL is enforced by states, courts, and international organizations by the imposition of shame sanctions on offenders and that these sanctions affect state behaviour in the same ways that traditional coercive sanctions do. In doing the above, we also develop the concept of a shaming reference group.

Keywords: international law, shaming, states, Canada, UK, Germany, US

Suggested Citation

Gopalan, Sandeep and Fuller, Roslyn, Enforcing International Law: States, IOs, and Courts as Shaming Reference Groups (March 13, 2013). Brooklyn Journal of International Law, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2014, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2232902 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2232902

Sandeep Gopalan (Contact Author)

University of Maryland Eastern Shore - School of Business and Technology ( email )

2105 Kiah Hall
Princess Anne, MD 21853
United States

Roslyn Fuller

INSYTE Interdisciplinary Research Group ( email )

Waterford
Ireland

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
260
Abstract Views
1,730
Rank
214,004
PlumX Metrics