Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement

In Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement: Premises of a Pluralist International Legal Order, Professor Brad R. Roth provides readers with a working knowledge of the various applications of sovereign equality in international law, and defends the principle of sovereign equality as a morally sound response to disagreements in the international realm.

The United Nations system's foundational principle of sovereign equality reflects persistent disagreement within its membership as to what constitutes a legitimate and just internal public order. While the boundaries of the system's pluralism have narrowed progressively in the course of the United Nations era, accommodation of diversity in modes of internal political organization remains a durable theme of the international order. This accommodation of diversity underlies the international system's commitment to preserving a state's territorial integrity and political independence, sometimes at the expense of efforts to establish a universal justice that transcends territorial boundaries. Efforts to establish a universal justice, however, need to heed the dangers of allowing powerful states to invoke universal principles to rationalize unilateral (and often self-serving) impositions upon weak states. In Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement, Brad R. Roth explains that though
frequently counterintuitive, limitations on cross-border exercises of power are supported by substantial moral and political considerations, and are properly overridden only in a limited range of cases.

About the Author:
Brad R. Roth is a Professor of Political Science and Law at Wayne State University, where he teaches courses at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels in international law, human rights, political theory, and legal studies. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he served as a law clerk to the Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court and then as a practicing lawyer before earning an LL.M. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Governmental Illegitimacy in International Law (Oxford University Press, 1999), winner of the 1999 Certificate of Merit from the American Society of International Law as "best work in a specialized area," and the author of an array of journal articles and book chapters dealing with questions of sovereignty, constitutionalism, human rights, and democracy.