Introduction

The late, great Oscar Schachter was not an elitist. One of the central premises of his article, "The Invisible College of International Lawyers," was that the active "professional community" of professors, students, government officials and international civil servants was capable, through "heterogenenity and representativeness," of balancing out "the particularistic influences" of national biases to "avoid the misperceptions and omissions that accompany them." His invisible college was simply a group of professionals capable of reaching international consensus precisely because, ...