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The fields of International Law and International Relations (IL and IR) have overlapping substantive concerns, entangled histories and a striking divergence in craft and sense of purpose. For many decades, the two fields grew part; only recently have there been signs of rapprochement. Nevertheless I rather doubt that overlapping substantive concerns will win out over deep differences not just in the way that members of the two fields do what they do, but even more in the way they justify what they do. To illustrate this rather grand assertion, let me point out that IR has experienced a much discussed ‘turn to practice,’ an embrace of ‘reflexivity’ first seen in sociology, and finally a wide, uneven turn to ethics.  Nothing comparable seems to have taken place in International legal theory.

I have toiled in these two fields for fifty years. I have given IR a good deal more attention in the last twenty years than I have given to IL (the first twenty years were the other way around). It is altogether possible that I’m just too distant from IL these days to see everything that’s been happening. Nevertheless, I have come to think there is a large reason, a background condition, for both the rather limited signs of rapprochement between the two fields and the apparent fact that a significant number of IR scholars have turned to ethics, but few scholars in IL have done so. As one might suspect, the reason is related to the divergence in craft and sense of purpose that I just alluded to.

IR has always had a difficult relation to the world of policy—to statecraft. In this context, the practice turn is just one more futile attempt to breach the theory-policy gap, not to mention the fact-value distinction embedded in science as craft. By contrast, law makes practice a vocational imperative. Persuasion is the point of legal argument. Advocacy means that values actively shape the lawyer’s interpretation of the facts in any case, including the facts of law. (I should point out parenthetically that this interpretation of what lawyers do reflects the Anglo-American way of thinking about law as a vocation; scholars trained in Continental law will see things somewhat differently. I should also point out that the Anglo-American way has decisively affected the way international law is practiced—no doubt a reflection of two centuries of Anglo-American hegemony.)

As Martti Koskenniemi so forcefully demonstrated in From Apology to Utopia (1989), the practice of international law is suffused with liberal assumptions. International law is indeed a major element in liberalism as a global project and an integral feature of the modern world. I need not dwell on the specifically Anglo-American origins of this project and the many ways that liberalism is imbued with Anglo-American........

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