The law of international responsibility is the regime of general international law that regulates the conditions, content and consequences of the responsibility of states and international organizations for breaches of international law. This central area of international law raises significant challenges in practice, challenges which stem in part from certain weaknesses in the original conceptualization of what the responsibility of a public institution should be.
Curiously, the answers given by the majority of international lawyers to these challenges are generally uninformed by the discussions that philosophers of the law of liability (national, whether private, public or criminal) have been conducting for many years. Nor do international liability lawyers usually have recourse to comparative (national) law in this field. However, the solutions they come up with are rooted in one or other of the (mainly Western) national traditions from which the drafters or interpreters of the international liability law regime originated. Conversely, theorists of the law of responsibility have paid little attention to the international responsibility of States and international organizations, and hence to the international law relating to them. Nor do they generally seem to have recourse to comparative (national, whether private, public or criminal) liability law, and even less to comparative international law, to develop their (supposedly universal) theories of liability.
