Reflections on the Formalist and Critical Approaches to the Rules of International Law

Like any other legal system, the international legal system requires both recognizing and justifying legal rules therein. Formalist approaches have arisen in international law in order to identify legal rules from other legal inference based on formal logic and deductive argument. However, staying within the formalistic and formal frameworks of international law, as defined in formal sources such as treaties, custom, general principles of law, and some resolutions, is incompatible with the dynamics of this branch of law. Critical approaches to law have marked the failure of formalism in the emergence and justification of the rules of international law. Each of the formalist and critical approaches claims that their own method is right in identifying, explaining, justifying, and interpreting the rules of international law. The present article seeks to review and theoretically analyze the contribution of each of them in the logic of international law through reviewing and reflecting on the origin and methods of each of these two approaches in recognizing the rules of international law.