Fear and Loathing in Jus Cogens
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200806300107 |
| Date | 01 March 2008 |
| Published date | 01 March 2008 |
| Author | Ed Morgan |
| Subject Matter | Article |
We were somewhere around custom on the edge of the convention when
the doctrine began to take hold.1The purpose of this essay is to take a
Hunter S. Thompson-like journey to the heart of international law, to cir-
cumvent the banality of the discipline—a place that is “viciously over-
crowded...where almost everybody seems vaguely happy”2—and ascend the
discipline’s heights in search of norms that have profound meaning.
Despite the attractiveness of seeking to remedy breaches of the most fun-
damental global rules, the trek may be a frustrating one. As will be seen, the
unyielding proliferation of arguments has at times threatened to reduce the
international legal world to one in which “there is not much left except…”,
well, fill in the blank.3
Ed Morgan is associate professor in the faculty of law at the University of Toronto.
1 Hunter S. Thompson,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the
Heart of the American Dream
(New York: Random House, 1972), 1.
Fear and
Loathing
was originally published in the November 1971 issue of
Rolling Stone
mag-
azine as a mock journalistic coverage of a fictional car race in the Las Vegas desert.
Crawford Woods, “The best book of the dope decade,”
New York Times Book Review
,
23 July 1972.
2 Hunter S. Thompson,
Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the
‘80s
(New York: Summit Books, 1988), 11.
3 Ibid., 10.
| International Journal | Summer 2007 | 101 |
Ed Morgan
Fear and loathing in
jus cogens
A journey to the heart of international law
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