“By no means has [an international law professor] sensed such profound skepticism concerning the legitimacy and usefulness of the self-discipline he teaches. Hasn’t the appalling battle unfolding earlier than our eyes demonstrated with super eloquence the vainness, or no less than the acute fragility, of a so-called authorized order in relations between states, on the very second when its improvement was introduced as sure and full? Is it not, subsequently, a really critical error and peril to steer individuals to belief within the rationality of regulation in an space the place pressure has the final phrase?”
These phrases may simply be mistaken for yet one more occasion of lamentation about worldwide regulation uttered in 2024. Many readers could also be stunned to listen to that they had been pronounced by Dionisio Anzilotti in his inaugural convention on the College of Rome just some weeks after the invasion of Belgium by Germany in 1914.