The Power of Legitimacy and the Legitimacy of Power: International Law in an Age of Power Disequilibrium

Abstract

The American Society of International Law (ASIL), incorporated by Act of Congress in 1950, was founded in 1906 “to promote the establishment and maintenance of international relations on the basis of law and justice.” As we celebrate the centennial of this, the Society’s principal publication, it is appropriate to examine the present and future prospects of this project. Is it still a compelling aspiration in the era of U.S. superpower-dom? The founding of the Society and initiation of the Journal (AJIL) must be seen in the context of the then-prevalent American commitment to the idea that a world of international law and international tribunals would be a natural, even historically inevitable, extrapolation of a good American idea. Speaking in 1890 to the first Pan-American Conference, President Benjamin Harrison congratulated the delegates on formulating a hemispheric arbitration agreement. “We rejoice,” he said, “that you have found in the organization of our Government something suggestive and worthy of imitation.” At The Hague in 1907, Secretary of State Elihu Root, the founding president of the ASIL, called for the creation of an international court “which would pass upon questions between nations with the same impartial and impersonal judgment that the Supreme Court of the United States gives to questions arising between citizens of the different States.”

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