Recognition of International Law: From Formal Criteria to Substantive Principles

According to traditional approaches international law and domestic law were seen either as two separate legal orders (dualism) or as two different branches within the same legal order (monism). There are reasons, however, to deem this dichotomy inadequate to capture the complexity of the contemporary legal framework. In order to overcome this trouble, it is suggested that we could resort to the Hegelian notion of recognition. The complex interrelations that tie legal orders invite focusing one’s attention on the processes through which the status and rank of a legal order become acknowledged within another legal order. To achieve this task we can make use of the concept of recognition. Such a strategy presents us with a means of discarding some prevailing formalistic assumptions and opens the way to an assessment of the role that substantive principles play within international law.