Janik on States Are Not Men: Traces of International Law's Creation Myth @RalphJanik

Ralph R. A. Janik, Sigmund Freud Private University; University of Vienna; Andrassy University Budapest; Webster University, Vienna Campus, is publishing States Are Not Men: Traces of International Law’s Creation Myth, in the Hague Yearbook of International Law (2022/2023), special edition. Here is the abstract.

The following pages will try to describe the evolution of the idea of states as moral persons in international law scholarship and how it has been perverted throughout the 20th century. It does not, however, attempt to describe the entire story or construe a logical, if not inevitable sequence of thinkers and ideas. Rather, several traces from the birth of sovereignty all the way to the UN Charter era shall be contrasted with more recent ideas emphasizing the separateness of states, peoples, and governments. The final part will then locate current legal thinking about statehood along the polar opposites of, on the one hand, states as idealized personifications of the common will of their people and, on the other, how a liberal understanding of limited sovereignty stands in contrast to anthropomorphic conceptualizations of statehood.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.