Toward a neopragmatist international jurisprudence: New Haven, contingency and the question of legal obligation

The New Haven School of Myres McDougal and Harold Lasswell, et al. offered an approach to International Law deeply influenced by Pragmatism, Legal Realism social science. Their approach was systematic and scientistic, yet broadly humanistic. Much of the basis of their project has been challenged in recent years.; The purpose of this dissertation is to retain and promote the aims and emphases of the New Haven project, but to do so with resources from contemporary Neopragmatist thought. Neopragmatism lends the New Haven jurisprudence a needed new set of conceptual resources. These tools will allow us to move away from the contestable teleological, functionalist and process-based account of law utilized by New Haven while still retaining and defending the telos itself.; This will entail an engagement with the New Haven school in which I bring to the fore their debts to Pragmatism (chapter two) and Legal Realism (chapter three), and attempt to rework aspects of their theoretical edifice along Neopragmatist and Constructivist lines. I will focus specifically on the reluctance of McDougal and Lasswell to discuss International Law's "Sources Doctrine"; it will be the primary theoretical task of this dissertation to offer a coherent account of the sources of International Law from within a pragmatist international jurisprudence.; Although I am generally critical of McDougal and Lasswell's functionalist understanding of the sources of international law, the particular focus of my efforts will be to explain the basis of the obligation of customary international law and the categorical obligation of Jus Cogens, peremptory norms of international law. This is a task New Haven's "Prescription Function" is unable to perform, and one in which mainstream international jurisprudence show little interest. In locating the source of customary legal obligation, I argue that the move from a state engaging in a practice to its becoming bound to continue is an instance of Hume's is/ought problem. In explaining jus cogens' categorical obligation, I turn to Rorty's concept of a "final vocabulary", which allows us to see how a norm can be both insuperable yet simultaneously subject to change.