THE NEGLECTED VIRTUES OF BRIGHT LINES: INTERNATIONAL LAW IN THE 2014 UKRAINE CRISES

I. INTRODUCTION Given the prevalent absence of authoritative interpretation--let alone adjudication and enforcement--international law is frequently dismissed as so open-textured as to admit of competing conclusions about its application to any significant controversy. At the same time, ironically, international law incurs criticism for the inflexibility of its foundational rules, which are deemed both insensitive to imperative principles of justice and unrealistic in the face of non-compliant but efficacious policies. The Ukraine Crises of 2014 offer the following reminders: that international law indeed has determinate relevant applications; that its characteristic inflexibilities ground cooperation among participants who cannot be expected to agree about justice; and that delegitimation of unlawful conduct serves an important purpose even where non-compliant policies cannot be reversed in the near term. Russia's armed take-over of Crimea and its direct and indirect forcible interventions in support of the "Peoples Republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk are unambiguous violations of international law. Unavailing are efforts by Russia's apologists to rationalize these acts by reference to the increasingly widespread acceptance of Kosovo's 2008 Unilateral Declaration of Independence and to the 1991-1992 recognitions of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina amid the non-consensual dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav cases have, however, inspired among many advocates and scholars a disparagement of the traditional territorial integrity norm for its insensitivity to claims based on considerations of democracy, constitutionality, history, or ethno-national coherence. 1 The Ukraine crises illustrate the dangers of invoking such considerations against the norm of territorial inviolability, given ...