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Desta, Melaku Geboye --- "Soft Law in International Law: An Overview" [2012] ELECD 631; in Bjorklund, K. Andrea; Reinisch, August (eds), "International Investment Law and Soft Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: International Investment Law and Soft Law

Editor(s): Bjorklund, K. Andrea; Reinisch, August

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781003213

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Soft Law in International Law: An Overview

Author(s): Desta, Melaku Geboye

Number of pages: 12

Extract:

3. Soft law in international law: an
overview
Melaku Geboye Desta

I. CONTEXT

When the ILA Study Group on the Role of Soft Law Instruments in
International Investment Law was established by the ILA Executive
Council in November 2008, its mandate was `to study the development of
soft law instruments in international investment law and the feasibility of a
``codification'' of the present state of this field of international economic
law'. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a broad, and far from
comprehensive, overview of the large body of literature on soft law and its
role in international law generally. While this chapter thus informs the rest
of the book, it does not purport to provide a shared understanding of the
concept or set limits to the scope of each contribution ­ indeed, each
contributor wrote their chapter without reference to this introductory
chapter or any constraint imposed by a Group-level understanding of
what exactly we mean by soft law.


II. A BRIEF LOOK AT THE SOFT LAW LITERATURE

Concept

The question of whether there is any normative instrument or
arrangement that lies somewhere below what is law, but above what is
not law, in international relations, or more broadly whether there are
different degrees of normativity in international law,1 has generated a


1
International law is often described as a normative system (with broadly
three types of norms: prescriptive, prohibitive and permissive) and an operational
system. See e.g. Rosalyn Higgins, Problems and Process: International Law ...