29 - A Global Rule of Law

Summary

The view of international law as a profession committed to the spread of liberal ideas emerged in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century.¹ One of those ideas was the rule of law. Attempts to realize a global rule of law and attempts to constitute an international community have long been linked. For many international lawyers, this gave international law a sense of forward movement and a clear telos, with the caveat that the reality of unequal power relations meant that international law could never be measured directly against a model borrowed from domestic law and politics.