Legal Commentary

Although I am not teaching it this year, I have regularly taught Public International Law, which in my opinion is one of the most interesting and important courses in the law school curriculum. (Kudos to those law schools that require students to take at least one international or trans-national course in law school.) One of the challenges of teaching the subject is getting some of the more resistant students to buy into the idea that international law (and particularly customary international law) is ?law.?

Every year, some students in class ask this question: ?Isn?t this course just all about politics and power? How can this be about law?? Those students (not all, mind you) simply have trouble getting past the horizontality of the system -- in their minds, there cannot be ?law? without meaningful top-down enforcement. No judges + no legislature + no police = no law. It does not matter how many times we read Article 38 of the ICJ Statute or the section 102 of the Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law of the United States; they just seem to have a permanent mental block.

This is by no means a unique problem, but it has bothered me. How, I have wondered, can I convey the material to those students in a way they can truly grasp? How can I get those students to at least understand the concept of international law, if not agree with it?

The answer came to me the other night while I was playing a game of four square in my driveway with my young kids: why not play four square in class? I am sure others have looked to the playground for examples of horizontality, but at least as far as I can tell (and I have searched) no one has discussed using four square as a means of demonstrating and teaching about the sources of international law, and about international law being more than politics and power. Often a simple example is the best way to drive difficult points home by putting them in a more understandable context. In a post later today or tomorrow I will discuss the game of four square as my kids play it, and then consider how it could be used in a Public International Law course.