ABSTRACT
Legal scholarship lacks a scientific definition of international law that can distinguish it from other kinds of legal and normative phenomena. Oleksandr Merezhko contends that such a definition can be formulated on the basis of Petrażycki’s theory of law, which views law as a psychological phenomenon. From this perspective, international law can be defined as one or more human beings’ convictions concerning the reciprocal rights and obligations of states between each other and, more generally, between all entities accepted in their community, such as the United Nations, the European Union, and future generations. All these entities are the subjects of international law. Psychologically, the subjects of international law are objects of representation found in the psyches of people who deal with international law with no need of extrapsychical, sociological counterparts such as empirically existing organized groups. To be sure, Petrażycki also offers a sociological conceptualization of state, and this makes it possible to provide a sociological conceptualization of international law, as a form of social coordination between independent (or “sovereign”) public groups: states, tribes, etc. Finally, Merezhko notes that the Petrażyckian viewpoint also makes possible a legal-dogmatic approach to international law as a system of judgments on its subjects’ reciprocal rights and legal obligations. Such an approach is based on normative facts and intuitive-legal principles.
