Steven Ratner, The Thin Justice of International Law: a Moral Reckoning of the Law of Nations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 471 pp, hb £50.00.

Date01 September 2016
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12221
Published date01 September 2016
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REVIEWS
Steven Ratner,The Thin Justice of International Law: a Moral Reckoning
of the Law of Nations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 471 pp,
hb £50.00.
Steven Ratner’s book The Thin Justice of International Law provides an assessment
of the international legal system at the bar of justice. This is a book clearly
written against the current. Although for centur ies international lawyers
were seriously concerned with deeper normative questions, today this type
of exercise is quickly - and often mistakenly - dismissed as natural law. This
charge often conflates the claim that the law must be morally defensible (ie,
that unjust laws warrant criticism, reform, and under certain circumstances
disobedience) with the claim that law and morality are internally connected.
The type of ethical evaluation of legal institutions that Ratner proposes is an
instance of the former, not necessarily the latter.
Furthermore, most international law and IR scholars will argue that
international law has little to do with global justice. Order, stability and power
are far more popular notions when seeking to explain why international law
as a project has succeeded, and whether and how it works. In a world where
moral values allegedly vary so much, they will claim, talking of justice is
at best beyond the point, at worst the preferred parlance of empire. Even
critics of the legal system or of particular areas or norms avoid putting
their claims in the language of justice. Yet though none of these claims
are expressed in moral terms, they imply normative judgments about what
is desirable, or at least preferable. They all make value judgments which
ultimately rest on moral considerations about what is good, or right. What
is not always clear is what those underlying moral considerations are, and
how they relate to other important and deeply held normative intuitions we
hold. A theory of the justice of international law seeks to provide us with
exactly that: a workable system of normative commitments which would allow
us to assess, criticise and eventually improve international institutions and
arrangements.
In sum, Ratner’s book will not be short of detractors. They may find the
specific substantive claims he advocates less objectionable than his intellectual
enterprise. Nevertheless, that kind of judgment would be short-sighted. This
book constitutes an ambitious and rigorous attempt to build bridges with
other relevant disciplines in order to better understand the moral strengths and
shortcomings of the international legal system. Ratner pushes international
legal theorists into tackling new and pressing questions. Indeed, contemporary
lega l theo ry ha s expe ri ence d a slow tra nsit ion away from the c lass ical j uri spr u-
dential questions, towards more substantive issues. International legal theory -
currently concerned mainly with traditional questions such as interpretation
or positivism - may well profit from following this trend.
C2016 The Author.The Moder n Law Review C2016 The Modern Law Review Limited. (2016) 79(5) MLR 919–929
Published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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