Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Michigan Journal of International Law

Abstract

I can claim neither to have been a student nor a colleague of John Jackson, yet as an advocate for a principled jurisprudence of international trade, there is a sense in which, increasingly, I find myself working in his shadow. Long before such a position was fashionable, Jackson argued for a "rules-oriented" approach to the management of international trading relations, opposing the "power-oriented" view that such relations should be conducted through an endless series of diplomatic compromises or adjustments between the sovereignty interests of different states. Jackson's position had the potential to seem either naive, judged against how the "real world" of global economic power actually functions, or threatening to traditional diplomatic and bureaucratic prerogatives (or both). Yet, as David Kennedy's seminal article on Jackson's scholarship suggests, Jackson pursued his vision of trade "legalism" not through articulating the claims of international law in the grand utopian style of some post-war publicists, but in a pragmatic fashion-he evoked the various ways in which legal rules could function as an effective ''management tool" for business-people and perhaps also bureaucrats preoccupied with international economic relations, allowing them to more effectively respond to the multiple, daily pressures involved in operating within the post-war global political economy. Jackson suggested that relatively clear and precise rules could win for managers a degree of stability and predictability in an increasingly complex and volatile world. In sum, he made the project of global legal order seem like something friendly and useful, rather than threatening or arcane. Behind this pragmatic "style" one can nevertheless catch glimpses of a grander vision of liberal internationalism. "To a large degree," Jackson writes, "the history of civilization may be described as a gradual evolution from a power oriented approach, in the state of nature, towards a rule oriented approach." Yet this Whig reading of history is itself immediately followed by a caution: "However, never is the extreme in either case reached." Thus, while it is not the full story, Jackson's pragmatism is more than a simple operating strategy for promoting liberal international ideals in the day-to-day world of global managers; it is "hardwired" into his substantive vision of international (dis)order. This vision is idealistic in its hopes for progressing from the "state of nature," yet it remains within the shadow of "the state of nature." With the creation of the World Trade Organization ("WTO"), Jackson's pragmatic advocacy for a "rules-oriented," "constitutionalist" approach to international economic relations has received tremendous vindication. Yes, as I shall argue in this appreciation, with the institutions of the WTO, Jackson's argument for legalism in trading relations may have achieved more "success" than the Hobbesian caution in Jackson's vision might want.

First Page

107

Volume

20

Publication Date

1999

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