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An Interview with Oscar Schachter

In a 1977 law review article, Oscar Schachter wrote of an "invisible college of international lawyers," a group of scholars whose work largely went unnoticed by their target audience: states. Schachter's 1977 remarks served as the basis for this year's ASIL Annual Meeting theme. In an interview with Edith Brown Weiss, professor at Georgetown University Law Center, Schachter explained his statement and revealed his observations on how the college and international law itself have evolved over the past quarter of a century. Schachter, a long-time member of the "college" and a past president of the ASIL, began by dissecting the meaning of his now-famous metaphor. A college is "something like an organization devoted to expounding learning," he said—"senior and junior people engaged in exposition." Schachter agreed with Brown's suggestion that international lawyers are an epistemic community of vested interests. It is "almost like a crusade," he said. There seems to be a sense of mission with international lawyers around the world—which is not the case with tort or contract lawyers. International lawyers are bound together through identification with a cause, not just subject matter. In calling the international law community a "college" in his 1977 law review article, Schachter said that he had in mind the character of the group that formed the international law community in the past. The college used to be a fairly small community made up almost entirely of upper-class, European, French-speaking, male lawyers who knew or were related to each other. This was one reason people could call it a college, Schachter said; you could see the people who comprise the college—there were not that many. Among the members of the college, there were a few people who achieved great prominence—mostly writers of the great treatises. Beneath them were the academics, and then people in government, but there were very few, if any, lawyers from the private sector. Schachter described the college as invisible because there was a gap between what went on in law and its consumers at large, between what took place in the production of international law materials and the users of those materials. "None of this gets through to the customers, the states involved," Schachter lamented. "The community of states is really not connected up" with international legal materials, he said. So has this dilemma been resolved? What has become of the invisible college and, indeed, of international law since Schachter first made this observation? International lawyers are engaged in much activity, but there is still a gap between these activities and the general public, Schachter said. Some changes since the 1970s have brought experts and scholars closer to the community, their customers, and thus the college itself has become more visible, but its materials remain invisible. Using the example of an International Law Commission report, Schachter noted that the report cites only one instance to establish the existence of a particular rule. The conclusion drawn in the report is based on only the cited instance, although there is much more that could be said. Therefore, much of the work of international lawyers on the subject, having been left out of the report, goes unseen. Although someone in the State Depart-