Soviet and Western International Law and the Cold War in the Era of Bipolarity: Inter-Block Law in a Nuclear Age

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
“The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.” OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR., The Path of the Law (1897).The “WINDS OF CHANGE” in the Soviet Union since Stalin's death — what, in a legal context, the leading journal Soviet State and Law has called the programme “for complete elimination of the harmful consequences of the personality cult in Soviet jurisprudence” — have done much to liberate Soviet international law thinking from the at times overly rigid positivism and rather sterile orthodoxy which had dominated it, in common with Soviet general legal doctrine, from the time of Pashukanis' downfall in the late 1930's, onwards through the period of Vyshinsky's intellectual dominance almost to the present day. For the purpose of analysis and appraisal of the contemporary state of Soviet international law doctrine and practice, both as to its main points of accord and also its main policy conflicts and differences, certain preliminary propositions can be advanced as to the nature and condition of Soviet international law in general over the years since the October Revolution.

This publication has 33 references indexed in Scilit: