Full Product Details
Author: Steven R. Ratner (Bruno Simma Collegiate Professor of Law, Bruno Simma Collegiate Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 16.20cm
, Height: 3.30cm
, Length: 24.00cm
Weight: 0.894kg
ISBN: 9780198704041
ISBN 10: 0198704046
Pages: 486
Publication Date: 15 January 2015
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
To understand the current international system as a normative order, a dialogue between legal scholarship and philosophy is essential, striking the right balance between reflections on both practice and principles. In this book, Steven Ratner, a leading scholar of international law, achieves this masterfully. He presents a nuanced reconstruction of the core norms of justice of the international legal order with its major pillars of peace and human rights that is both grounded in practice and transcends it. A milestone for future discussions of justice beyond the state. Rainer Forst, Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main Ratner has made a major contribution to a new and progressive development: the effort to bridge the gap between philosophical treatments of global justice, which tend to ignore international law, and international legal scholarship, which tends to be philosophically under-informed. Allen Buchanan, James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law, Duke University and (annual) Visiting Professor of the Philosophy of Law, Law School, King's College London The Thin Justice of International Law is a major achievement. It shows how, for all its limitations and flaws, international law contains a morally compelling core, not just in what it says but in what it does. Against the cynics, Ratner demonstrates how the project of upholding and strengthening international law is of immense moral importance. Elizabeth Anderson, John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Reading Steven Ratner's superb new book is like attending a symphony presided over by a first-rate conductor. We know at once that we are in safe hands, but that we are in for an exciting ride... Here is a thoughtful legal scholar, one well-versed in the cognate disciplines of international relations and global politics, engaging in the difficult and ambitious task of bringing international law scholars and political philosophers into informed conversation with each other, after a long period of mutual suspicion and misunderstanding... Ratner's book is rigorous, timely, elegant, and challenging. It is also, ultimately, a hopeful and inspiring book, pointing us to a thicker conception of global justice to which we can legitimately hope to aspire. Christopher McCrudden FBA, Queen's University Belfast, and University of Michigan Law School
Ratner has made a major contribution to a new and progressive development: the effort to bridge the gap between philosophical treatments of global justice, which tend to ignore international law, and international legal scholarship, which tends to be philosophically under-informed. Allen Buchanan, James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law, Duke University and (annual) Visiting Professor of the Philosophy of Law, Law School, King's College London The Thin Justice of International Law is a major achievement. It shows how, for all its limitations and flaws, international law contains a morally compelling core, not just in what it says but in what it does. Against the cynics, Ratner demonstrates how the project of upholding and strengthening international law is of immense moral importance. Elizabeth Anderson, John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Reading Steven Ratner's superb new book is like attending a symphony presided over by a first-rate conductor. We know at once that we are in safe hands, but that we are in for an exciting ride... Here is a thoughtful legal scholar, one well-versed in the cognate disciplines of international relations and global politics, engaging in the difficult and ambitious task of bringing international law scholars and political philosophers into informed conversation with each other, after a long period of mutual suspicion and misunderstanding... Ratner's book is rigorous, timely, elegant, and challenging. It is also, ultimately, a hopeful and inspiring book, pointing us to a thicker conception of global justice to which we can legitimately hope to aspire. Christopher McCrudden FBA, Queen's University Belfast, and University of Michigan Law School
Ratner's extensive experience as an expert and adviser to the Unites States' government, international non-governmental organizations and various international institutions on a wide range of issues... brings rich texture to the discussion of the effects of international law rules on protecting peace and respecting human rights. This feature is reason enough to read the book, for a reader unfamiliar with international law will gain more than a basic understanding of its operation. It also marks the book as a vast improvement over the ample scholarly discourse on global justice, which has paid scant attention to the way in which international law operates and the values it embodies. International law is at best marginal to such discourse, and if it plays any role at all is to serve as a contrast to strongly idealized concepts of an international global order. * Carmen Pavel, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews * Steven Ratners The Thin Justice of International Law offers a timely, comprehensive and theoretically rich interdisciplinary theory of international law's relationship with global justice. It is a major contribution to the burgeoning literature on global justice, with a fine eye to legal detail and institutional design. * Patrick Macklem, Michigan Law Review * Ratner is able to convey the crux of complex debates in a couple of sentences and he takes many controversial issues head on. The combination of detailed knowledge of international law and its connexion to philosophical conceptions also makes this book a perfect introduction to international law... it needs to be wholeheartedly applauded. * Christoph Kletzer, Law and Philosophy * Ratner does not limit his engagement with political philosophy to one topic or his philosophical interlocutors to one or two big names. Rather, he makes the courageous choice to dive into the deep end of contemporary political philosophy, to engage with arguments made by more than two dozen theorists on topics including war, self-determination and secession, state borders, sovereign equality, human rights, universal jurisdiction, global trade, and international investment. * David Lefkowitz, Ethics * The Thin Justice of International Law is carefully written and meticulously argued; it covers a vast array of issues and contemporary debates. Furthermore, it does so with impressive command of the relevant arguments in both law and philosophy. Ratner's conclusions are always judicious and sensible. * Alejandro Chehtman, The Modern Law Review * The Thin Justice of International Law provides a unique perspective on the ethical underpinnings of the international legal order and the ability of international law to contribute to a more just world order... [It] is undoubtedly a source from which related interdisciplinary debates can emerge. * Nikolaos Pavlopoulos, International and Comparative Law Quarterly * The Thin Justice of International Law is a work that encompasses the nature of justice and the grounds, justification, and purpose of a proper international ethics; sovereignty as well as self-determination and humanitarian intervention; trade law and investment law (and everything in between); and it does so with competence and originality. It is an important book, written in an accessible style, and featuring an impressive amount of research. The book engages the reader on multiple levels by putting forward interesting theoretical innovations, while demonstrating acute awareness of the underlying legal and political realities. * Pietro Maffettone, Journal of International Economic Law * To understand the current international system as a normative order, a dialogue between legal scholarship and philosophy is essential, striking the right balance between reflections on both practice and principles. In this book, Steven Ratner, a leading scholar of international law, achieves this masterfully. He presents a nuanced reconstruction of the core norms of justice of the international legal order with its major pillars of peace and human rights that is both grounded in practice and transcends it. A milestone for future discussions of justice beyond the state. * Rainer Forst, Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main * Ratner has made a major contribution to a new and progressive development: the effort to bridge the gap between philosophical treatments of global justice, which tend to ignore international law, and international legal scholarship, which tends to be philosophically under-informed. * Allen Buchanan, James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law, Duke University and (annual) Visiting Professor of the Philosophy of Law, Law School, King's College London * The Thin Justice of International Law is a major achievement. It shows how, for all its limitations and flaws, international law contains a morally compelling core, not just in what it says but in what it does. Against the cynics, Ratner demonstrates how the project of upholding and strengthening international law is of immense moral importance. * Elizabeth Anderson, John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor * Reading Steven Ratner's superb new book is like attending a symphony presided over by a first-rate conductor. We know at once that we are in safe hands, but that we are in for an exciting ride... Here is a thoughtful legal scholar, one well-versed in the cognate disciplines of international relations and global politics, engaging in the difficult and ambitious task of bringing international law scholars and political philosophers into informed conversation with each other, after a long period of mutual suspicion and misunderstanding... Ratner's book is rigorous, timely, elegant, and challenging. It is also, ultimately, a hopeful and inspiring book, pointing us to a thicker conception of global justice to which we can legitimately hope to aspire. * Christopher McCrudden FBA, Queen's University Belfast, and University of Michigan Law School * The book will draw global justice theorists into the realm of practice by emphasizing existing features that are rightly subject of praise. The norms of sovereign equality, noninterference into the affairs of other states, and the ban on the use of force are essential to an understanding of justice at the international level. * Carmen Pavel, King's College London *
Author Information
Steven Ratner is the Bruno Simma Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. His research has focused on a range of contemporary challenges facing governments and international institutions, including ethnic conflict, territorial borders, implementation of peace agreements, regulation of foreign investment and global business, the normative orders concerning armed conflict, and accountability for human rights violations. For the last ten years his research has concerned issues at the intersection of ethics and international law. Outside the academy, he was a member of the UN Secretary-General's Group of Experts on Cambodia in 1998-99 and of the UN's Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka in 2010-11. Since 2009, he has served on the State Department's Advisory Committee on International Law.
