Human Rights
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Abstract
not in the textual commitments agreed to at the end of 1994, but in the semantic web that the Appellate Body has subsequently created. This is important as the percentage of successful WTO appellants is close to ninety percent. The WTO in the vocabulary of justice through free trade has spurned politics for first movers’ advantage—economics’ catchy epithet—as far as litigation is concerned. For Venzke, ‘‘private norm entrepreneurs’’ constitute an important cog in the rotating wheel of international law-making by interpretation (p. 65). Scholars, as members of the international law commission and other private institutes, have much to add to the meaning of law. An ensemble of legal scholars, IIs, and ICTs negotiate the semantic content of the law in question. Everything, as Venzke says, begins from the deed of interpretation through actors and agencies. The latter part of the book focus on the ‘‘normative implications’’ of the ‘‘communicative lawmaking’’ by international institutions (pp. 196–8). The classic understanding of international law as a product of state will besets Venzke. He thus sets out to correct the utopia of international law by invoking ‘‘a competing narrative of legitimacy’’, linking it to the idea of justice. For him the statist Lotus position belies the functional truth of international law, i.e. it is today hardly the product of state will. Once states agree to a text of international law, the actual law rests in its interpretation. This relocation of the meaning of agreed bargaining empowers scholars, judges, IIs, and ICTs to fix the meaning of international law. Venzke uses a set of sociological theories that might explain the semantics of text, context, and action in international law. While ‘‘communicative action’’ comes from Habermas, weaving Koskenniemi into the arguments exposes the indeterminacy of the law between apology and utopia (pp. 217–23). Venzke has tried to strike a balance. He thinks that actors of international law can no longer hide behind the small print. The focus on process and agency has now exposed the inadequacy of seeing law as a product simply of states’ will—indeed the truth is far from it. International law is a product of creative interpretation and normative twists (pp. 196–264). This book, peppered with not only English but German and French footnotes, sets out to find new audiences as it sits between the theory and practice of international law. While it plants the seed of a new discourse on the public authority of international law, the epilogue points to the open-ended nature of the discourse. As such, the semantics of international law is less about winners and losers than it is about a continuous dialogue between actors and participants who lose or win battles in an attempt to win a never-ending war.