Why Must Read International Law?

Britain's top two university presses have competing texts on public international law (PIL): Brownlie's Principles, now written by James Crawford, from Oxford, and Malcolm Shaw's book from Cambridge. I've never taught PIL per se, though I teach some subjects that are adjacent to it (such as space law). For many years I've bought alternating editions of both books, so that I always have at least one up-to-date reference on my shelf. Shaw was always my go-to book, but I never thought about there being much difference between the two. That changed with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. I checked the most recent (9th) editions of both works (2021 for Shaw, 2019 for Brownlie) to see if there was precedent for the UN General Assembly having authority to send in peacekeeping forces. It was much easier to find the appropriate material using Shaw's index. And whereas Brownlie stuck mainly to a superficial "four corners" analysis of the words of the pertinent treaty (in this case, the UN Charter), Shaw also had an extensive discussion of historical practice. As a result, one gets very different conclusions: that the Security Council has a monopoly on sending peacekeepers (Brownlie) vs. that the General Assembly has at times taken on concurrent jurisdiction over such matters, dating back to the Suez Crisis in 1956 (Shaw). In retrospect, this shouldn't have been a surprise: Shaw's main text is 400+ pages longer than Brownlie's, and seems to have somewhat more text per page as well. Perhaps if you're teaching the basics of PIL, or learning it for the first time, Brownlie's more concise treatment is an easier choice for getting the main ideas across. But for a better idea of how PIL has actually worked in practice, Shaw is hands-down -- or hands-on -- superior as a general reference, before checking more specialized works.