We Are The Woooorld

Over at Ace's place, Gabriel Malor starts a series of post on the thesis that International Law is a good thing, which Jack M. quickly smacks down.

Personally, I believe it depends on what one means by "international law". The One World/Global Village mentality, which posits that all peoples have a common set of underlying values and rights which can be overseen by a centralized world government, has generated such hopelessly bogus entities as the League of Nations, the United Nations and the like and is, imho, laughable on its face. On the other hand, bilateral and multi-lateral treaties entered into by various nations based on their mutual interests arguably do produce tangible benefits.

Not that I especially care, but it brought to mind an amusing anecdote.

Back in the days of my legal edjookation, I found myself on our school's international law moot court team (along with a certain other Llama contributor who shall go nameless just in case the Williamsburg VA police are still looking for that guy who was drunkenly slouching in the back seat of that speeding car at three in the morning). All I remember about the issue we went off to argue was that it had to do with seabed mining rights and the Law of the Sea. Because we were very much a pick-up team and nobody really seemed to give much of a damn, we decided that we would thoroughly enjoy ourselves at the tourney (thus the drunks in the car at three ack emma).

Lest you've conjured in your mind a mental image of ol' Robbo as the perpetually squeeky-clean nerd, I will candidly admit that I was still quite buzzed when I went into my first round of arguments at 7:00 in the morning. I don't recall what I said, but I do recall that my presentation was smooth and flowing. As a result, I scored quite high - something like 7th out of 40-odd overall.

Came my second round at about 1:00 in the afternoon and the tide had seriously turned. Armed with a wicked pissah hangover by then, I neither knew nor cared what my points were anymore. What was worse, I was matched up against some weedy little dork from Duke. Not only did he look just the type to think international law was exciting, he also had an extremely fabulous babe positively draped around him. This combination of iniquities proved too much for me, and my incoherent ramblings about who had what right to what material on the goddam seabed quickly tailed off into something not far from personal abuse against my opponent. Needless to say, I was among the back markers in terms of scoring the second round.