The view was expressed that resolutions adopted outside Chapter VII could also be binding; The legal basis for this is the broad powers conferred on the Council by Article 24, paragraph 2, which provides that „in carrying out these tasks (exercising primary responsibility for international peace and security), it shall act in conformity with the purposes and principles of the United Nations”. The binding nature of these resolutions was confirmed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its advisory opinion on Namibia. The binding nature of such decisions can be inferred from an interpretation of their language and intent. Read PDF Controversiae (Controversiae) is the first word in Book I of Hugo Grotius` founding text De Jure Belli ac Pacis (The Law of War and Peace, 1625). Much modern research in international law has followed Grotius` line of thinking in focusing the issue on the problem of dispute management. Since the late nineteenth century, generations of eminent scholars and practitioners have shaped a conception of international law that emphasizes the legal doctrines and documents relating to disputes: the specific rules on which one party to the dispute may rely against another, the sources (e.g. treaty law, customary law) on which an international tribunal relies to determine the rules of international law; general principles (e.g. acquiescence, abuse of rights) that international tribunals have adopted from national legal systems in order to conform to the fundamental principles of international law proclaimed by the tribunals (e.g. In this context, it is important to stress the importance of a particular settlement decision or agreement. This orientation owes much to the sociological model of the successful international jurist as it has developed over the last century in the English and French traditions of international law: that of the academically respected practitioner, primarily the worldly consulting professor or the official lawyer, whose career included both academia and the representation of litigants in dispute resolution. and could eventually lead to becoming a judge or arbitrator in an international tribunal and author of general lectures and essays. Of course, these researcher-practitioners are also committed to formulating general standards and upholding community values. But the intertwined practice and science of international dispute settlement have oriented the question towards specific questions of whether a State is bound by a particular rule that the other State may invoke (the question of the contradiction of certain norms between the parties), and far from what would otherwise have been an overwhelming concern with the construction of a global normative order.
Similarly, the emphasis on dispute settlement gives higher priority to resolving bilateral problems than to defending other types of Community interests. It also tended to promote positivist legal science, highlighting materials already generated by recognized sources of law (contracts, usual legal practice of the actors concerned, judicial decisions, scientific opinions, etc.) and strictly separating the declarations of the lex lata from proposals for reform de lege ferenda. Legal systems are sets of norms, whether in the law of nation-states, supranational entities or international law. All legal systems contain norms that impose an obligation on natural or legal persons to perform or abstain from certain acts (primary rules). In most cases, legal systems also include explicit metanorms for creating, modifying, judging, and enforcing primary rules, in particular norms that determine legal powers, procedures, and entities (secondary rules). Legal systems are often, but not necessarily, hierarchically organized, like the legal systems of nation-states, which are united by a common constitution and divided, for example, into federal, state, municipal law. However, international law, with its imperfectly coordinated international regimes, often lacks hierarchical integration. Unlike norms supported by ideologies or philosophical theories, legal norms are necessarily based on and derive from the actual social practices of certain collectives. Without a social practice to support it, positive law ceases to exist. Legal norms share this characteristic with informal social norms and, like the latter, legal systems generally respond to non-compliance with some form of explicit sanctions (McAdams and Rasmusen, 2007). But, contrary to social norms, legal systems are formal institutions administered according to rules by specialized judicial officials acting in a legal capacity on behalf of legally structured organizations such as legislators and courts. The norms of positive law are thus linked to the very conduct of judges, who are often subject to deliberate changes and confined to a particular jurisdiction.
In this respect, positive law has the characteristics of an observable social fact that is in time and space. States may also submit their disputes by mutual agreement to the International Court of Justice, based in The Hague, Netherlands. The judgments of the Court of Justice in these cases are binding, although it has no means of enforcing its decisions. The Court may, at the request of an organ authorized for that purpose by the Charter of the United Nations or in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, give an advisory opinion on any question of law.