Cleaved International Law: Exploring the Dynamic Relationship between International Climate Change Law and International Health Law

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The field of international law often is taught and thought of as a group of disconnected substantive subfields, each with its own epistemic community. These specialized subfields range from international human rights law to the law of the sea, from international trade law to collective security law. Examples where subfields conflict with each other and separate examples where subfields complement each other have led two camps of commentators over the past decade to comprehensively define international law’s nature as either united or fragmented in a binary fashion. Even the United Nations’ International Law Commission established a study group to explore this topic, which concluded in 2006 after over four years of study that international law is fragmented due, in part, to the collision of various branches of international law. Efforts of both camps to articulate a complete theory that largely ignores or severely downplays the examples of the other camp creates disturbing anomalies, or rather antinomies, which “requires a reexamination of our fundamental premises” if one assumes the accuracy of one of the two camps. This Article, which reflects the core theme of a forthcoming monograph by the corresponding author, does not attempt to definitively resolve this perennial debate over the nature of international law in such an all-or-nothing binary fashion. Rather, it takes a more nuanced, middle-ground approach by exploring how two subfields of international law – here, international health law and international climate change law – simultaneously conflict with and complement each other.