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Two fish are swimming in a pond. 'Do you know what?' the fish asks his friend. 'No, tell me.' 'I was talking to a frog the other day. And he told me that we are surrounded by water ' His friend looks at him with great scepticism: 'Water? What's that? Show me some water ' International lawyers often find themselves focused on the practice of the law rather than the underlying theories. This book is an attempt to stir up 'the water' that international lawyers swim in. It analyses a range of theoretical approaches to international law and invites readers to engage with different ways of legal thinking in order to familiarize themselves with the water all around us, of which we hardly have any p...
A runner-up for the 2018 Chadwick Alger Prize, International Studies Association's International Organization Section, this provocative reassessment of the rule of law in world politics examines how and why governments use and manipulate international law in foreign policy.
The most important (in)determinacy theses in international law since the 1920s are scrutinised in this book. As Severin Meier demonstrates, the extent of legal determinacy depends neither on some linguistic essence found in the text nor on theories that allegedly stand above practice. Instead, the (in)determinacy of law is shown to arise purely from practice. This reconceptualisation of a key discussion in legal philosophy provides a new perspective on the frame of meaning of legal norms.
This collection of self-reflective essays explores the relations between international legal professions and their respective understandings of international law.
Conventionally, international legal scholarship concerned with norm conflicts focuses on identifying how international law can or should resolve them. This book adopts a different approach. It focuses on identifying those norm conflicts that law cannot and should not resolve. The book offers an unprecedented, controversial, yet sophisticated, argument in favour of construing such irresolvable conflicts as legal dilemmas. Legal dilemmas exist when a legal actor confronts a conflict between at least two legal norms that cannot be avoided or resolved. Addressing both academics and practitioners, the book aims to identify the character and consequences of legal dilemmas, to distil their legal fu...
This edited collection examines the changing role of the legal profession as experts in the context of European Union policy-making. Drawing on theoretical and empirical research and the idea of law as a social and political practice, this socio-legal work brings together a group of legal scholars and political scientists to investigate how lawyers, through the deployment of their expertise and knowledge, act as experts in matters of EU related policy-making at the national, European and international levels. It provides new theoretical viewpoints and untold stories from legal experts themselves, promotes an evolving definition of what constitutes legal expertise and what shapes legal experts in a time when experts are in equal measure both revered and ignored, and introduces new critical voices in the field of EU socio-legal studies.
Inspiring and distinctive, After Meaning provides a radical challenge to the way in which international law is thought and practised. Jean d’Aspremont asserts that the words and texts of international law, as forms, never carry or deliver meaning but, instead, perpetually defer meaning and ensure it is nowhere found within international legal discourse.
The question of the sources of international law inevitably raises some well-known scholarly controversies: where do the rules of international law come from? And more precisely: through which processes are they made, how are they ascertained, and where does the international legal order begin and end? This is the static question of the pedigree of international legal rules and the boundaries of the international legal order. Second, what are the processes through which these rules are made? This is the dynamic question of the making of these rules and of the exercise of public authority in international law. The Oxford Handbook of the Sources of International Law is the very first comprehen...
International law is constantly navigating the tension between preserving the status quo and adapting to new exigencies. But when and how do such adaptation processes give way to a more profound transformation, if not a crisis of international law? To address the question of how attacks on the international legal order are changing the value orientation of international law, this book brings together scholars of international law and international relations. By combining theoretical and methodological analyses with individual case studies, this book offers readers conceptualizations and tools to systematically examine value change and explore the drivers and mechanisms of these processes. Th...