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54 Duke L.J. 975 (2004-2005)
Internalization through Socialization

handle is hein.journals/duklr54 and id is 989 raw text is: INTERNALIZATION THROUGH SOCIALIZATION HAROLD HONGJU KOHt Professors Ryan Goodman and Derek Jinks have authored an important paper and have begun an important project: how the process of internalization of international law into national behavior transpires through the process of socialization. That project continues their important joint work on the Institutional Theory of Sovereignty' by sketching an ambitious outline of an integrated model of social mechanisms that influence state behavior. In this comment, let me explain first, why the project and this paper are important; and second, how their project could be strengthened in the years ahead. Until quite recently, the enterprise of International Legal Scholarship had long been viewed as a complex oxymoron: like the Holy Roman Empire, which, of course, was neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire, or the New York Giants, who are neither New, from New York, or Giants. Similarly, many domestic lawyers had assumed that if the subject was international, there could be no law involved, and if the subject was international law, there could be no scholarship involved. All that changed less than two decades ago, when international law finally met international relations theory.2 Unlike many other areas of legal scholarship, international law was a relative latecomer to interdisciplinarity; the field only became interdisciplinary about fifteen years ago, not coincidentally about the time that the collapse of the Berlin Wall signaled the new functionality of international law Copyright © 2005 by Harold Hongju Koh. t Dean and Gerard C. & Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, Yale Law School. 1. See Ryan Goodman & Derek Jinks, Toward an Institutional Theory of Sovereignty, 55 STAN. L. REV. 1749, 1750 (2003) (proposing a sociological model of sovereignty stemming from their systematic reexamination of the questionable empirical assumptions about the nature of the state and its relation to the international order). 2. For a review of the evolution of this collaboration, see generally FOUNDATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND POLITICS (Oona A. Hathaway & Harold Hongju Koh eds., 2004).