Monica Hakimi
Thank you to Kostia Gorobets and Andrea Carcano for convening this symposium and to all the contributors, who so thoughtfully responded to my piece. Though I cannot do justice in this reply to all the excellent points they raise, I want to draw on a few threads. The sovereigntist theory is bad because it is confused. It defines too narrowly and ultimately misrepresents what international law (in practice) is, what international law (in practice) does, and why international law (as a practice) can be worthwhile.
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Wouter Werner
When I started thinking about my response, I was tempted to do justice to the richness of the arguments. However, I resisted this temptation for a very practical reason. In a short post like this one, my argument would become a bit like the law in Hakimi’s metaphor: a bramble bush reaching out in all directions without a clear authorial voice to keep the story together. A nice metaphor for the life of law, but a bad model for a blog post. Therefore, I decided to do something that Hakimi hopefully pardons: I made a sovereigntist move, singled out one core point from her article and wove my arguments around it.
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Marcel Brus
During my academic life, which including my student days, spans almost 50 years, I engaged in trying to solve some of the complex riddles of what we call international law. How to relate international law as a legal system to the society it serves; what actually is the society it serves; and how does it respond to changes in that society? Where Monika Hakimi remains focused on theory, I probably lean more toward the possible impact of this on international law in practice.
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Gemma Lligadas González
Recent US practice has moved toward a more robust form of withdrawal, more extreme forms of resignification, and has adopted disruptive policies – such as the sanctions against the International Criminal Court and UN Special Rapporteurs – that suggest not merely disengagement, but an active effort to undermine the institutional scaffolding of key legal regimes within the (until now) US-backed liberal international order. Following Hakimi’s call to build theory taking as a starting point the realities of international practice, this new form of hegemonic engagement with international law should also inform our general theory of international law and help us better explain the authority of the system itself.
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Veronika Bílková
Scholarly works on international law appear constantly. From time to time, however, a text emerges that prompts us to look at the entire body of literature through different eyes. Monica Hakimi’s article Thinking Constructively about International Law is one such contribution. This contribution argues that Hakimi offers a valuable new lens for reconsidering international legal thought, but questions whether moving beyond sovereignty is either necessary or desirable. It suggests that sovereignty and alternative forms of authority may be better understood as potentially complementary.
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Doruk Erhan
A specter is haunting international legal theory, and according to Monica Hakimi, it is the specter of Thomas Hobbes. It is not that there is widespread demand for a global leviathan to replace the many domestic ones. The Hobbesian specter, Hakimi argues, resides in the background, in the collective assumptions through which international lawyers see their own field, its successes and limits.
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Kostia Gorobets, Andrea Carcano
In recent years, Professor Monica Hakimi of Columbia University has been a leading voice in tackling the role of theory and philosophy of international law. This stream of thinking aims not only at elucidating the role, function, and authority of international law, but also at bolstering constructive thinking about its proper place in today’s world. Her recent piece “Thinking Constructively about International Law” is an insightful analysis that exposes some fundamental conceptual premises of our discipline and challenges them with a cogently structured set of questions: Do these premises still hold? Are we still justified in relying on them? And if not, what should we be doing instead?
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