Private Lawyer in Disguise? on the Absence of Private Law and Private International Law in Martti Koskenniemi’s Work

“Human rights are like love,” Koskenniemi suggests, “both necessary and impossible.” An eccentricity? Equations of law and love may seem like the stuff of poets, not legal theorists, let alone practitioners. And yet, Koskenniemi, the leading public international lawyer, finds among legal theorists an unlikely ally in his claim that law and love are interrelated. Ernest Weinrib, perhaps the leading North American theorist of private law, makes the same claim for private law that