Is International Law International?

Anthea Roberts' ambitious monograph, Is International Law International?, calls on international lawyers to suspend our universalist pretensions and reflect from the perspective of different communities of international lawyers, conceived instead as a 'divisible college'. Her innovative and contemporary empirical work - on the educational and discursive practices across the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council - represents nothing less than a first stab at a sociology of the international legal profession. In doing so, Roberts has adopted a consciously descriptive approach, with all of the consequences entailed thereby. Moreover, her privileging of certain methods and the focus on the five veto- wielding powers has the potential to reproduce the very power imbalances that she seeks to illuminate and possibly to challenge. Finally, an important counterpoint to the divisibility of the international legal profession is that, however diverse we may be, we nevertheless remain united by certain other tenets - in particular, our shared understanding of what concepts and ideas find purchase on the international plane and our engagement with, commitment to, or resistance to these concepts and ideas. The ties that bind our epistemic community might be obscured by undue emphasis on our profession as a divisible college.