International Law Weekend
Attended the first full day of the International Law Weekend. I have many things to tell, but you'll have to wait until next week for the details. I'll say only this for now: you learn a tremendous amount at conferences like these, but talking about international law gets depressing when you hear all of these intellectuals speak about how every major problem is insoluble.As one professor, an optimistic one, said to a pessimistic panelist, "C'mon! You're a creative lawyer!" I think of myself as a creative lawyer. I like to think I think out of the box. The problems of creating an accountable, workable international court system, for instance, are old and difficult and fraught with political realities that we don't like to mention, but if the Soviet Union can fall, anything can happen.
Or maybe these are formally optimistic intellectuals who have encountered reality and have crashed.
Who knows? I'm still young and optimistic enough to look at pessimism as useless.
posted by Michael Brenner @ 9:08 PM
1 Comments:
No way! There's nothing more fun that pessimism. I think of myself as an optimistic pessimist, which means, that I know everything that can possibly go wrong will, and I take it cheerfully. That's different from a pessimistic optimist, who's confident everything will be all right IN A VERY LONG RUN. Which one do you prefer?! ; )
Irina
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