Teaching and Learning International Law in Troublesome Times

The article addresses the changes occurred over the last fifty years in the research and teaching of international law, which have sensibly increased their complexity and difficulty. In particular, the following multiple changes are illustrated and emphasized: the increased number of bodies of material international law, parallelled by the multiplication of international jurisdictional fora; the accelerated evolution of the political configurations of the international society since the Cold War, up to the Contemporary demise of multilateralism and the upsurge of nationalism; the quest for reform and change of the international regulatory setting, so as to meet new social, climatic and technological challenges; increased diversity of methodological approaches to international legal research, in terms which find no comparator in the differences between legal methodologies existing in the last quarter of the last century; and, finally, the ensuing cleavage between the international law scholarship and the international legal profession.