International Law Explained | Kal Raustiala | Big Think

International Law Explained

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The depth and breadth of international law.

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KAL RAUSTIALA:

Kal Raustiala writes and teaches in the areas of international law and international relations. He holds a joint appointment between the UCLA Law School and the UCLA International Institute, where he teaches in the Program on Global Studies. He is also director of the UCLA Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations (click here to read about this appointment). The Burkle Center is UCLA's primary academic unit that fosters interdisciplinary research and policy-oriented teaching on the role of the United States in global cooperation and conflict, and military, political, social and economic affairs.

Professor Raustiala's research focuses on international cooperation and conflict in areas such as environment, trade, armed conflict, dispute resolution, and intellectual property. Recent publications include "The Global Struggle Over Geographic Indications," European Journal of International Law (2007), "The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design" (with Chris Sprigman), Virginia Law Review (2006) and "Form and Substance in International Agreements", American Journal of International Law (2005), which won the 2005 Francis Deak Prize from the American Society of International Law. His current book about the extraterritorial reach of American law, Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?, will be published by Oxford University Press in May 2009.

Professor Raustiala has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago Law School. Prior to coming to UCLA he was a research fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at The Brookings Institution, a Peccei Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems, and an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and editorial board of International Organization, he is a frequent media contributor whose writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the International Herald Tribune and Le Monde

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TRANSCRIPT:

Kal Raustiala::

I think international law is one of these things that’s a little bit like the air where it’s everywhere. We don’t really notice it so when you get on a plane and you fly to Europe the ability to get on that plane, cross over the air space of other countries, sometimes you see the little map when you’re in the plane that shows you’re crossing over Greenland or whatever, all of that is governed by international law in different ways. Different treaties are in place to take care of all the questions that might arise about aviation. So that’s a really mundane example and then at the other extreme we’ve got much more contentious examples like-- Let’s take the war in Iraq. So as most of us remember in the run up to the war the Bush administration went to the security council at the United Nations and tried to get a second resolution, and they’re doing that because there is a legal framework in place that governs the ability of countries to enter in to armed conflict. So between those two bookends a zillion other examples but I think the thing to recognize about international law is in a globalized world, in an integrated world, you are constantly dealing with things that are crossing borders or you’re crossing borders and international law is usually playing some role in shaping that.

Question: What dictates international law?

the most common thing are treaties and most of us are familiar with-- I mentioned aviation. There are treaties governing that. The UN itself was created by a treaty. So treaties are kind of the backbone a little bit like we think of statutes in the domestic context, but we do have something like common law. We call it customary law so a good example would be the law of the sea. There’s all kinds of rules about ships and their ability to go on the high seas and who can board and where they can cross. Most of that is governed by custom and the idea is this custom kind of a cruise over time like the common law becomes entrenched and accepted as law, and then there is also courts. Right. So we have-- The International Court of Justice sits in The Hague and we’ve got a series of other courts. Right. The World...

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