Swimming the New Stream: The Disjunctions Between and Within Popular and Academic International Law
In the postwar era, legal scholars moved to a pragmatist approach in international legal thought.' Pragmatism refers to "a modem consequential philosophy that emphasized institutional process, functional progress, or rule-centered doctrinal specificity, while denying the relevance of coherent abstraction."2 This approach attempted to cultivate a just world order based on the rule of law, forcing nations to adhere to legal principles at the expense of raw aggression.' Its goal was to use doctrinal analysis as the ultimate technique in analyzing issues of institutional process and order in the international arena.' Unfortunately, pragmatism never set forth a central theory of social behavior, but simply hovered between the older naturalist and positivist' schools of thought. Pragmatism focused only on descriptions of varying institutional forms and practices at the expense of theorizing about the nature of law and social behavior.6 Without reference to a core theory to explain the nature of social interaction in the international context, the pragmatist approach foundered on doctrinal shores. Thus the resultant research that it yielded produced a fragmented body of highly specific lists and observations about international law lacking a cohesive evaluation of