PROLOGUE: REINSTATING CULTURAL COMPLEXITIES

In an article titled “A Pluralist Approach to International Law,” Paul Berman (2007) examined the culturalist work of Robert Cover and his emphasis on decentering the role of the state by examining “norm-generating communities” rather than nation-states, as well as the work of Myres McDougal, Harold Lasswell, and Michael Reisman in their attempts to pay homage to different forms of actors engaged in what he described as norm-generating processes. This focus on social processes came to represent the groundwork for what is known as the New Haven School of International Law, which foregrounded the importance of processes and micropractices central to the production of cultural norms. Berman's intervention set the stage for the successors of the core insights from earlier interventions and turns its focus to the work of Harold Koh and others who insist that a new New Haven School is important to effect legal practices in an increasingly complex world (2007a:304). Such a discussion outlines the need for moving from state-centered models to processes that open analytic spaces for understanding changing legal consciousness in a pluralist world.

Coined by Harold Koh, among many, as law and globalization, this new New Haven School has taken on the work of Robert Cover. Berman indicates: “Koh again invoked Cover to explain how an epistemic community was formed around a specific interpretation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and the ways in which this community successfully pushed the internationalization of its preferred interpretation into U.S. governmental policy” (2007a:310).