Nuclear Weapons and International Law: Illegality in Context

It is a distinct pleasure-more than that-a great privilege to speak tonight as this year's McDougal lecturer.I thank you for the invitation.In my judgment, Myres McDougal is without peer among international law scholars and jurisprudential thinkers in the Twentieth Century.He is to the fields of international law and jurisprudence, I believe, what Albert Einstein was to the world of physics: a man of seismic vision and consequence.So it is for me a tremendous honor as well as pleasure to be here tonight, speaking under his name.Not that Mac would agree with everything I plan to say this evening; indeed, he sometimes thinks of me, I suspect, as one of his black sheep, somehow gone astray.But if ever there was a man willing to engage in honest disagreement and still call you a valued friend and colleague, that man is Myres McDougal-provided, of course, that you muster the intellectual wherewithal needed to make that disagreement honorable and respected.Myres McDougal does not suffer fools lightly.Now in the interest of avoiding the fool's errand, let me say at the outset that I harbor no illusions about the role of law and lawyers in relation to nuclear weapons and warfare.There is only so much any one constituency, professional or otherwise, can do by itself.But relative to the other professions, the legal profession can boast, I believe, at least three comparative advantages when it comes to such matters of high state policy as that of nuclear weapons and warfare; and each merits at least brief mention.One is found in the realm of negotiation, mediation, conciliation, and the like-the so-called table skills of agreement-making and conflict settlement.Alan Sherr and others of us from LANAC (the Lawyers Alliance