An appreciation of Jonathan I. Charney.

• Author: Damrosch, Lori Fisler
• Position: International law teacher

Jon Charney preceded me into the academic world by a dozen years and already had a well-established reputation in international law when I was a brand-new law teacher. At the time we met in 1984, Jon was tackling some of the most ambitious topics in the theory and practice of international law, and he reached out to others for collegial engagement on those subjects. From the mid-1980s, he and I worked together on three collaborative books and on many projects for the American Society of International Law and the American Journal of International Law.

Among the themes that preoccupied Jon as his scholarship blossomed, I would like to single out two that are fundamental and pervasive. First, he asked the deepest questions about the creation of legal norms for a diverse and changing international community: can there be a genuinely universal international law? (1) Is international law ultimately grounded on the consent of states, or could legal obligations take hold even if states have not consented to them? (2) Second, he was concerned with the institutional framework in which international law is applied and international disputes are adjudicated: are international courts capable of ruling effectively on the kinds of disputes that litigants have sent them in the last few decades? Now that we have a veritable constellation of international tribunals, will their jurisprudence fit together for a coherent rather than fragmented international law? (3) It is not necessary to be an international lawyer to understand that those questions are fundamental to the theory of international law, indeed to the nature of law itself. They epitomize the perennial challenge for our discipline: is international law really "law"? Jon was committed to the nature of international law as "law" and to the value, even the virtue, of holding its sources and methods and its institutions to the most probing scrutiny.

In the mid-1980s, our profession went through one of its periodic paroxysms over an issue of national and international policy, on that occasion in reaction to the case known as Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States). (4) In 1985, I was asked by one of the leaders of our field, John R. Stevenson, a former Legal Adviser of the Department of State, to help set up a study group on the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in order to develop high-quality scholarship that could be relevant to states that were rethinking their policy positions toward the Court. Jack Stevenson chaired the study group and I edited the papers that our group produced in 1985 and 1986, which were published as The International Court of Justice at a Crossroads. (5) In a planning meeting at the American Society of International Law in Washington in 1985, Jack proposed the names of the best scholars of and practitioners before the ICJ who should be invited to join the study group. Jack identified Jon as one of the handful of younger-generation lawyers with this expertise. They had worked together on the Gulf of Maine Boundary case which the ICJ had decided the previous year (6)--Jack as Special Counsel for the U.S. delegation that presented the case in The Hague, and Jon as an expert on maritime boundary law.

It was in the context of the ICJ study group that I first came to work closely with Jon. The chapter that he wrote for the study tackled a set of problems concerning the attitudes of litigants and potential litigants toward international judicial settlement of disputes: he called the chapter "Disputes Implicating the Institutional Credibility of the Court: Problems of Non-Appearance, Non-Participation, and Non-Performance." (7) From the vantage point of the 1980s, the two paradigmatic and contrasting eases that were simultaneously pending at the Court were Gulf of Maine Boundary, which was submitted to the Court with the consent and active participation of both interested...