Global and Going Nowhere: Sustainable Development, Global Governance & Liberal Democracy

摘要

"How we decide and who gets to decide often determines what we decide."rnNearly one hundred years ago, Roscoe Pound discerned between "law in the books" and "law in action." Roscoe Pound was a Dean and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Prophesying the emergence of legal realism, Dean Pound was a pragmatist who was concerned that lawyers were hiding behind deductive models disconnected from reality. Pound also was a botanist. He understood that the sciences had long since abandoned such deductive modes of thinking in search of inductive reasoning and empirical verification. The "law in the books" was too often at variance with how the law actually unfolds in the real world. Lawyers were admonished by Pound not to behave as "legal monks," disconnected from the real world. Dean Pound worried about the application of unrealistic models of law and how they confounded the attainment of social justice in the United States, but his wisdom carries valuable lessons for today's international lawyers and policymakers who are busily constructing the global legal architecture ofrnsustainable development.