28 October 2014

Book review: James Crawford, State Responsibility – The General Part (CUP, 2013)

Forthcoming in International and Comparative Law Quarterly (2015)

Jean d’Aspremont^[1]

State responsibility is one of these foundational doctrines that give shape to international law as much as it gives it teeth. State responsibility provides a conceptual framework through which inadmissible behaviours are constructed, captured and acknowledged while also endowing international law with reactionary mechanisms against those behaviours deemed unacceptable. In that sense, state responsibility is both a screen where standards about what is admissible at the international level are projected as much a parapet from which respect of those standards can be defended. Needless to say that such a twofold functional view of state responsibility is all but ontological. It is the result of certain choices made by international lawyers as well as the socio-historical circumstances in which such choices were made. (more…)