Bruno Simma
Judge of the International Court of Justice
Major concerns as well as interests beget ideas, then concepts, principles, eventually practice, practice of law, at least sometimes. These are the familiar ways of all law including international law, everywhere and at all times. The present book on International Law and Sustainable Development. Principles and Practice is a vivid testimony in favour of that process.
International legal doctrine, while forever seeking to establish or at least paint certainty and predictability of legal order, has recently had to grapple with relatively unfamiliar, possibly somewhat unsettling phenomena of international life, to wit the proliferation of states, international organisations and of non-state actors, the “opening up” of supposedly “self-contained régimes” (such as that of the World Trade Organisation) and of the classical system of sources of international law, to name but a few.
Two of the most important legal questions arising from these changes of international socio-political reality, so to speak, constitute the central theoretical theme underlying all chapters of this copious collaborative work. The first is the emergence of evocative ideas relating to at least two pressing global problems, environmental degradation and poverty. The second concerns the still somewhat controversial contention, made at least implicitly throughout the book, that the principle of “sustainable development” is amply supported and reenforced by numerous instances of “practice”, justifying its elevation into the pantheon of international law.
Principles and practice of international law, its raw material, have one thing in common: both may develop from a state of amorphous flux until, after meanderings, and metamorphoses – “Prinzipienwanderung”, “Verdichtung von Praxis” – they may crystallize as the (legal) crux of a subject matter, perhaps enjoying unquestioned even unchallengeable authority in law. Naturally, while . . .
