This 2007 volume is intended to help readers understand the relationship between international law and international relations. As a testament to this dynamic area of inquiry, new research on IL/IR is now being published in a growing list of traditional law reviews and disciplinary journals. The excerpted articles in this volume, all of which were first published in International Organization, represent some of the most important research since serious social science scholarship began in this area more than (...) twenty five years ago. They are important milestones toward making IL/IR a central concern of scholarly research in international affairs. The contributions cover some of the main topics of international affairs to provide readers with a range of theoretical perspectives, concepts, and heuristics that can be used to analyze the relationship between international law and international relations. (shrink)

International Rules brings together exemplary works from the most prominent approaches to international rules of International Law and International Relations disciplines. Included are chapters on Natural Law, Legal Positivism, Classical Realism, the New Haven School, Institutionalism, Structural Realism, the New Stream, and Feminist Voices. Each of the eight chapters begins with a brief overview, offers a representative work or works, and concludes with a selected bibliography. From Hugo Grotius to David Kennedy, from George Kennan to Robert (...) Keohane, the featured authors provide valuable insights into their common subject: international rules. Despite divergent methods and objectives, they address fundamentally the same questions: What is the nature of such rules? What is their purpose? How do they originate? What role, if any, do they play in politics? Framing the selections assembled are two original chapter-length essays. The first chapter of this volume assesses the prospects for interdisciplinary collaboration; the final one suggests a direction for future research. (shrink)

지금까지 헤겔의 『법철학』은 주권 국가 내의 문제들에 한정해서만 주로 다루어져 왔고, ‘국제법’과 ‘국제관계’에 관련해서는 대부분 부정적 관점에서 논의되었다. 그러나 ‘국제법’과 ‘국제관계’에 관한 헤겔의 논의는 긍정적인 관점에서 새롭게 이해될 필요가 있다. 이러한 관점에서 주목해야 할 핵심 내용은 다음과 같다. 첫째, 헤겔은 『법철학』에서 실정적 조약들과 국제법을 분명하게 구분한다. 둘째, 국제법은 국가 간 인정관계를 전제로 하며 이 인정관계는 ‘보편적 당위의 형식적 측면’과 ‘인륜의 내용적 측면’을 필요로 한다. 셋째, 헤겔은 국제관계를 개별 주권 국가들의 대립적이며 적대적인 관계로만 보지 않고, 인륜의 관점에서 그들의 상호 인정과 연대도 (...) 중요하게 고려한다. 이러한 인륜의 측면은 한 국가 내에 제한되지 않는 인류 전체의 다양한 문화, 교육, 도야 등의 차원에서 인륜의 토대를 적극적으로 형성하고 확대해 나가는 과정을 동반한다. 여기서 중요한 점은, 이 과정이 칸트식의 ‘세계시민주의’처럼 위로부터 요청되는 것이 아니라, 역사적 과정에서 아래로부터 진행되어야 한다는 것이다. (shrink)

This book examines the concepts of international law and international relations as they are developed in the social and political philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel has a vision of a single modern social world, in which peoples and nation-states can co-exist under conditions of peace, justice, mutual respect, and prosperity.

There are limits to what can be achieved using the means and medium of international law. This article explores those limits by providing an innovative theory of the nature of international law and how we should understand its limits in terms of value theory. A "four functions" theory is proposed, and these functions are used to interpret areas of international law in terms of their distinctive and valuable contribution to a specific area of human relations. On the (...) basis of this analysis of international law and international legal interpretation, the paper argues that the cosmopolitan aims of a number of moral cosmopolitan scholars fail to taken into account the value limits of international law. This is presented as a value problem, not a problem of feasibility or practicality. (shrink)

In International Law and World Order, B. S. Chimni articulates an integrated Marxist approach to international law combining the insights of Marxism, socialist feminism and postcolonial theory. The book uses IMAIL to systematically and critically examine the most influential contemporary theories of international law including new, feminist, realist and policy-oriented approaches. In doing so, it discusses a range of themes relating to the history, structure and process of international law. The book also considers crucial world order (...) issues and problems that the international legal process has to contend with, including the welfare of weak groups and nations, the ecological crisis and the role of human rights. This extensively revised second edition provides an invaluable, in-depth and updated review of the key literature and scholarship within this field of study. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of international law, international relations, international politics and global studies. (shrink)

Institutional and political developments since the end of the Cold War have led to a revival of public interest in, and anxiety about, international law. Liberal international law is appealed to as offering a means of constraining power and as representing universal values. This book brings together scholars who draw on jurisprudence, philosophy, legal history and political theory to analyse the stakes of this turn towards international law. Contributors explore the history of relations between international law (...) and those it defines as other - other traditions, other logics, other forces, and other groups. They explore the archive of international law as a record of attempts by scholars, bureaucrats, decision-makers and legal professionals to think about what happens to law at the limits of modern political organisation. The result is a rich array of responses to the question of what it means to speak and write about international law in our time. (shrink)

Charles Covell examines the jurisprudential aspects of Kant's international thought, with particular reference to the argument of the treatise Perpetual Peace (1795). The book begins with a general outline of Kant's moral and political philosophy. In the discussion of Perpetual Peace that follows, it is explained how Kant saw law as providing the basis for peace among men and states in the international sphere, and how, in his exposition of the elements of the law of peace, Kant broke (...) with the secular natural law tradition of Grotius, Hobbes, Wolff and Vattel in the view he took of the foundations of the law to make peace in the international sphere. In the conclusion to the book, Kant and his law of peace are considered in relation to the condition of contemporary international society. (shrink)

Consequences of world-scale anti-terrorism campaign (which included pre-emptive and coercive regime changes in Afghanistan and Iraq) equaled to or even exceeded consequences of the terrorist challenge itself, and must be analyzed as dialectically interfaced dual factor influencing international politics and law. This dual factor changes basic rules of international relations through wider employment of the principle of pre-emption (retaliation against perceived intentions, rather than against actions), and further blurring of national sovereignty resulting from more coercive interference of the (...) international community into domestic affairs of certain states and societies. Counter-terrorism is philosophically interpreted internationally as reestablishment and strengthening of the monopoly of a state onto use of force, while terrorism is accused for illegal use of force “for private political purposes”. Counter-terrorist practices return previously missing severe coercive sanctions in the international law, and are implemented on behalf of the international community. The problem is to assure both legality and legitimacy of applied measures, especially in situation when major world powers’ interests are split in elaboration of the UN SC decisions authorizing the internationalinterference into sovereign affairs of states. In fact, the very field of counter-terrorism becomes a field for projection and juxtaposing pragmatic interests of world powers. Classical contradiction between international law based on values and principles and pragmatic politics based on interests re-emerges in the area of terrorist challenges/antiterrorist responses. Counter-terrorist practices require as much legal regulation as do terrorist challenges themselves. (shrink)

The book provides an overview of how international law is today constructed through diverse macro and microprocesses that expand its traditional subjects and sources, with the attribution of sovereign capacity and power to the international plane (moving the international toward the national). Simultaneously, national laws approximate laws of other nations (moving among nations or moving the national toward the international), and new sources of legal norms emerge, independent of states and international organisations. This expansion occurs (...) in many subject areas, with specific structures: commercial, environmental, human rights, humanitarian, financial, criminal, and labor law contribute to the formation of postnational law with different modes of functioning, different actors, and different sources of law that should be understood as a new complexity of law. (shrink)

This article posits an interpretation of Thomas More’sUtopiathat focuses on the ways in which the nature of justice within a putatively ideal state is illuminated by references to international relations and the law of nations. Like Plato’sRepublic,Utopiauses differences of scale to provide a lens through which to examine the operation in one context of a unitary concept that is more visible elsewhere. Justice is constructed as a single concept; thus, in the same way that Plato uses the justice of (...) thekallipolisto provide insight into the justice of an individual, More uses the justice of the international community to provide a macroscopic perspective on justice as it exists within a sovereign state. Through discussions of trade, diplomacy, war and empire, Utopian understandings of international law and justice are revealed. The ideal organisation of the state is then characterised as one in which the resulting notions of justice, defined as the correct operation of laws that accord with natural law, are institutionalised. (shrink)

Legality, interdisciplinarity and the study of practice -- Re-thinkinking interdisciplinarity by re-reading hume -- Tainted love : the struggle over legality in international relations and international law -- The power of legality, legitimacy and the (im)possibility of interdisciplinary research -- Moving while standing still : law, politics and hard cases -- International law, Kelsen and the aberrant revolution : excavating the politics and practices of revolutionary legality in Rhodesia and beyond -- Juris dicere : custom as a (...) matrix, custom as a norm, and the role of judges and (their) ideology in custom making -- Multiple legalities and international criminal tribunals : juridical versus political legality -- Palestine's quest for statehood and the practice of the United Nations -- Regulatory legality : extraterritorial rule across domestic and international arenas -- Legality and lawfare in regime implementation -- Whose legality? Rule of law missions and the case of Kosovo -- Perspectives on the perils, promise, politics - and practice of interdisciplinarity. (shrink)

In this article the author argues that men and boys have been historically and structurally rendered an invisible group of victims in international human rights and policy responses towards conflict-related sexual violence stemming from the United Nations. The apparent female-focused approach of instruments on sexual violence is criticized followed by a discussion – through analysis and interviews with legal scholars and champions for the recognition of male survivors’ experiences – of the first ‘emergence’ of male victims in these instruments (...) and key actors involved in this process. The existing serious dichotomy between visible and invisible victims is prominently based on their ‘gender identity’ and leads to structural discrimination of male victims of rape or other forms of sexual violence. To overcome this situation and develop more inclusive instruments, a reconceptualization is needed of the meaning and use of words like ‘gender’ and ‘gender-based violence’. Additionally, a more intersectional approach to sexual violence should be adopted, understanding that victims have a multitude of identities such as ethnicity or religious affiliation that make them particularly vulnerable to suffering. (shrink)

This paper presents preliminary results of a survey experiment examining the effects of international illegality on public support for proposed public policies. It adds three specific dimensions to the existing literature. First, it tests whether the effects of international illegality differ depending on the international regime whose rules are violated, testing the effects of violations of both human rights and trade regimes. Second, it tests how far the involvement of international courts vary these effects. And third, (...) it examines these questions using parallel studies with UK and US respondents to test the robustness and generalisability of the relations identified. Results confirm that, across both jurisdictions, illegality under either trade or human rights regimes, and with or without the additional involvement of an international court, have a statistically significant negative effect of public support for a policy. They further identify a greater negative effect where an international court has confirmed this illegality, although this result is statistically significant in only one case. They do not identify any statistically significant difference in the support depressing effect of illegality under the trade regime compared to the human rights regime. (shrink)

This essay argues that a restatement of Thomistic natural law reasoning is increasingly necessary in jurisprudential debate about international law. Mindful of Pope John Paul II's call for a renewal of international law, the essay engages with the present-day tension between Morgenthau-type realism and neo-Kantian discourse-oriented cosmopolitanism. The essay addresses whether the former is sufficiently realistic in our global 21st century context, and whether the latter is adequately cosmopolitan. Attention is drawn to Aquinas's understanding of the relation between (...) custom, consent and political authority in order to expose some of the limits of present-day statism, and to suggest that Thomistic natural law reasoning is, potentially at least, better able to cope with the intractable disagreement that characterises 21st century global relations than some forms of neo-Kantian jurisprudence. (shrink)

This book articulates a systematic vision of an international legal system grounded in the commitment to justice for all persons. It provides a probing exploration of the moral issues involved in disputes about secession, ethno-national conflict, "the right of self-determination of peoples," human rights, and the legitimacy of the international legal system itself. Buchanan advances vigorous criticisms of the central dogmas of international relations and international law, arguing that the international legal system should make justice, (...) not simply peace among states, a primary goal, and rejecting the view that it is permissible for a state to conduct its foreign policies exclusively according to what is in the "national interest." He also shows that the only alternatives are not rigid adherence to existing international law or lawless chaos in which the world's one superpower pursues its own interests without constraints. This book not only criticizes the existing international legal order, but also offers morally defensible and practicable principles for reforming it. Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination will find a broad readership in political science, international law, and political philosophy. (shrink)

The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being, and speaking that might help us achieve that aim. This book asks how international lawyers might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm's, both difficult and impossible. It suggests that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and proposes that they may (...) be re-enabled by speaking different sorts of international law, or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways. In this methodologically diverse and unusually personal account, Gerry Simpson brings to the surface international law's hidden literary prose and offers a critical and redemptive account of the field. He does so in a series of chapters on international law's bathetic underpinnings, its friendly relations, the neurotic foundations of its underlying social order, its screened-off comic dispositions, its anti-method, and the life-worlds of its practitioners. Finally, the book closes with a chapter in which international law is re-envisioned through the practice of gardening. All of this is put forward as a contribution to the project of making international law, again, a compelling language for our times. (shrink)

This chapter considers the key values underlying and explaining important features of international law as a system of law. It uses that value analysis as a way of interpreting international law and of asking whether, within those values, international law can be made to serve certain 'global cosmopolitan' re-distributive aims. The chapter argues that the constraints of international law mean that it is not an appropriate medium for global re-distributive goals commonly associated with theories of societal (...) justice. Because those features and constraints are based in values that international law distinctly serves, those constraints cannot simply be ignored, overridden, or changed judicially. (shrink)

James Turner Johnson has played a pivotal role in bringing just war thinking to the fore in international relations. This has brought with it increased interest in the relationship between the just war tradition and the laws of war. Whilst Johnson maintains that the legal rules relating to the conduct of war correspond with the requirements of jus in bello, he is more critical of the legal regime relating to recourse to force and has occasionally argued in favour of (...) the superiority of just war thinking to international law in this area. This article discusses Johnson's thinking on the relationship between ethics and law on recourse to force. It begins by outlining Johnson's approach before suggesting that it is overly critical of the post-1945 order. The paper concludes by calling for reconciliation between law and ethics. (shrink)

Biobank research and genomic information are changing the way we look at health and medicine. Genomics challenges our values and has always been controversial and difficult to regulate. In the future lies the promise of tailored medical treatments and pharmacogenomics but the borders between medical research and clinical practice are becoming blurred. We see sequencing platforms for research that can have diagnostic value for patients. Clinical applications and research have been kept separate, but the blurring lines challenges existing regulations and (...) ethical frameworks.Then how do we regulate it? This book contains an overview of the existing regulatory landscape for biobank research in the Western world and some critical chapters to show how regulations and ethical frameworks are developed and work. How should international sharing work? How design an ethical informed consent? An underlying critique: the regulatory systems are becoming increasingly complex and opaque. The international community is building systems that should respond to that. According to the authors in fact, it is time to turn the ship around. Biobank researchers have a moral responsibility to look at and assess their work in relation to the bigger picture: the shared norms and values of current society. Research ethics shouldn't only be a matter of bioethicists writing guidelines that professionals have to follow. Ethics should be practiced through discourse and regulatory frameworks need to be part of that public discourse. Ethics review should be then not merely application of bureaucracy and a burden for researchers but an arena where researchers discuss their projects, receive advice and practice their ethics skills. (shrink)

This essay presents an interpretation of the juridical thought of Cicero, Hugo Grotius and Adam Smith. Focussing upon questions of property, capital accumulation and violence, the essay traces a tension within their writings between a social ethic of human fellowship and compassion, and, a theory of the utility of ‘unsocial’ commercial self-interest. This tension forms a key problem for the tradition of liberal international law. For Grotius and Smith one response to this tension is to attempt to reign in (...) capitalist markets by asserting a range of moral duties to individuals and to the nation-state. The importance of stressing such an interpretation is to reject the flattening-out of the liberal political and juridical tradition by contemporary neoliberal thought, and to reclaim a number of ways of thinking about the global economy and international law in which moral action and political intervention are understood as playing a necessary and essential role. (shrink)

Whether we should respect international law is in dispute. In the United States, international law is dismissed by the left as merely promoting the interests of powerful states. It is attacked by the right as irrelevant and an interference with the interests and mission of the United States. And it follows from the arguments of many liberals that in the absence of world government the world is in a Hobbesian state of nature and international law inapplicable. This (...) article reviews the thinking of Kant, Locke, and Rawls, among others and shows how arguments against respect for international law can be answered. It questions arguments based on the analogy between states and individuals, and between international law as it has developed and law based on an ideal social contract between individuals. It then turns to the ethics of care, a recent addition to moral theory, and examines its major characteristics and recommendations. It considers how the ethics of care would view international law and the guidance this moral approach could provide for international relations. The article shows how the ethics of care is compatible with various current trends, and how thinking about globalization and greater international interdependence would benefit from greater attention to it. The article argues that the ethics of care would clearly support respect for international law as it has developed, but that it would even more strongly support addressing current problems in ways that would, in the longer term, make appeals to law and its enforcements ever less necessary. Keywords: international law; the ethics of care; moral theory; political theory; social contract; states; groups; Hobbes; Kant; Locke (Published: 16 September 2011) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 4 , No. 3, 2011, pp. 173-194. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v4i3.8405. (shrink)

RESUMEN: La labor del Tribunal Penal Internacional para la Ex-Yugoslavia tuvo un momento importante en la compresión del principio de legalidad, como principio básico en la garantía de los derechos humanos, al enfrentar no sólo el derecho consuetudinario como fuente de derecho sino también diferentes modos o enfoques en la identificación de este derecho consuetudinario. Esta relación debe ser analizada a la luz de las limitaciones que tiene el derecho internacional y, sobre todo, de los procedimientos de creación de normas. (...) No resulta fácil exigir responsabilidad en el cumplimiento del derecho internacional humanitario y de los derechos humanos. La práctica de este Tribunal abre una vía para la reflexión con la finalidad de asegurar el respeto de los derechos humanos en cualquier circunstancia, incluso de aquellos que llevaron a cabo la comisión de graves crímenes contra la comunidad internacional.ABSTRACT: The work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was important for understanding the principle of legality as a key principle on the guarantee of Human Rights. The former was due to the Tribunal’s work on having faced the customary law as a source of law using different perspectives for its identification. The link between customary law, principle of legality and human rights has to be analyzed taking in account the limits of International law and the procedures for creating legal norms. It is not easy to invoke responsibility in the fulfillment of international humanitarian law and international law of human rights. The practice developed by this Tribunal provides an avenue for thinking about ensuring the respect of the human rights in any case including the commission of grave crimes against international community. PALABRAS CLAVE: derecho internacional de los derechos humanos, principio de legalidad, derecho internacional humanitario, costumbre internacionalKEYWORDS: international law of human rights, principle of legality, international humanitarian law, international custom. (shrink)

The proliferation, globalization, and fragmentation of law in world politics have fostered an attempt to re-integrate International Law and International Relations scholarship, but so far the contribution of realist theory to this interdisciplinary perspective has been meagre. Combining intellectual history, the jurisprudence of IL and IR theory, this article provides an analysis of John H. Herz’s classical realism and its perspective on international law. In retrieving this vision, the article emphasizes the political and intellectual context from which (...) Herz’s realism developed: the study of public law in Germany during the interwar period and in particular the contribution of Hans Kelsen and the pure theory of law to the study of international law. Herz was deeply inspired by Kelsen but he criticized the pure theory for ignoring the sociological foundations of law. Following his emigration to the United States, Herz embraced realism but without disregarding international law. Indeed, his mature, globally oriented realism offers a balanced, fruitful perspective for thinking about the relationship between politics and law that is deeply relevant for contemporary theory: it challenges modern, law-blind variants of realism and holds considerable potential for contributing to the approaches that have most successfully studied the law–politics nexus. (shrink)

The article examines Hans Kelsen's and Carl Schmitt's lines of thought concerning the relationship between constitutional and international law, with the aim of ascertaining their respective ability to capture developments affecting that relationship, even those of a contradictory nature. It is significant that, while the rise of wars of humanitarian intervention in the post-Cold War era has evoked Schmitt's concept of the bellum iustum, the evolution in the direction of the “constitutionalisation of international law” has drawn attention to (...) Kelsen's theoretical approach. However, these assumptions rely heavily on the opposing objectives that the two authors claimed to pursue, such as, respectively, the search for the ultimate seat of political power and a pure theory of law. Things are more complicated, both because these objectives by no means exhaust Kelsen's and Schmitt's lines of thought, and because the conception of sovereignty as omnipotence, at the core of the Weimar controversy, is now behind us. (shrink)

This article recounts how Neo-Scholastic international lawyers navigated the complex political landscape of the 1920s and 30s, combining universalism, nationalism and religious belief. Participating in the contemporary re-engagement of Catholics with modern politics, they re-imagined the international legal order in Catholic terms. They argued that a universal morality, overruling the extremes of state sovereignty, was the only solid basis for just and stable global legal relations. While the contribution of Catholics to the establishment of the post-war world order (...) and the rise of human rights is widely acknowledged, the interwar genealogy of these developments is not. Reading these thinkers’ universalist legal tenets in conjunction with their political trajectories provides a relevant frame to understand the moral charge characterizing international law in the early years of the Cold War. (shrink)

Do states or individuals stand under duties of international justice to people who live elsewhere and to other states? How are we to assess the legitimacy of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations Security Council? Should we support reforms of international institutions and how should we go about assessing alternative proposals of such reforms? The book brings together leading scholars of public international law, jurisprudence and international relations, political (...) philosophers and political theorists to explore the central notions of international legitimacy and global justice. The essays examine how these notions are related and how understanding the relationships will help us comparatively assess the validity of proposals for the reform of international institutions and public international law. (shrink)

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 distill their legal function within the sphere of international law, and to encourage serious theoretical and practical investigation into the conditions that lead to a legal dilemma. The first part proposes a definition of legal dilemmas and distinguishes the term from numerous related concepts. Based on this definition, the second part scrutinises international law's contemporary norm conflict resolution and accommodation devices in order to identify their limited ability to resolve certain kinds of norm conflicts. Against the background of the limits identified in the second part, the third part outlines and evaluates the book's proposed method of dealing with legal dilemmas. In contrast to conventional approaches that recommend dealing with irresolvable norm conflicts by means of non liquet declarations, judicial law-making, or a balancing test, the book's proposal envisions that irresolvable norm conflicts are dealt with by judicial and sovereign actors in a complementary fashion. Judicial actors should openly acknowledge irresolvable conflicts and sovereign actors should decide with which norm they will comply. The book concludes with the argument that analysing various aspects of international law through the concept of a legal dilemma enhances its conceptual accuracy, facilitates more legitimate decision-making, and maintains its dynamic responsiveness." -- Publisher's website. (shrink)

Traditional state v. state war is largely a relic. How then does a nation-state protect itself - preemptively - against the unseen enemy? Existing international law - the Caroline Doctrine, UN Charter Article 51, Security Council Resolutions 1368 and 1373 - do not provide sufficiently clear guidelines regarding when a state may take preemptive or anticipatory action against a non-state actor. This article proposes rearticulating international law to allow a state to act earlier provided sufficient intelligence is available. (...) After examining international law, this article proposes a process-based "strict-scrutiny" approach to self-defense. Under this approach, the executive will have to convince a court, based on relevant, reliable, viable, and corroborated intelligence, that preemptive action is appropriate. This process leads to a check on the power o the executive by placing a judicial check on preemptive action, consequently establishing objective legal criteria for operational counterterrorism. Muge Kinacioglu, Department of International Relations, Bilkent, University, Turkey, wrote a response to my article titled, "A Response to Amos Guiora: Reassessing the Parameters of the Use of Force in the Age of Terrorism: Pre-emptive Action and International Law." Tarcisio Gazzini, Faculty of Law, VU University, Amsterdam, also wrote a response titled, "A Response ot Amos Guiora's Article on Pre-Emptive Self-Defence Against Non-State Actors.". (shrink)

This book addresses conflicts involving how law relates normative orders. The assumption behind the book is that law no longer automatically claims supremacy, but that actors can pick and choose which code to follow.

International lawyers have often been interested in the link between their discipline and the foundational issues of jurisprudential method, but little that is systematic has been written on this subject. In this book, an attempt is made to fill this gap by focusing on issues of concept-formation in legal science in general with a view to their application to the specific concerns of international law. In responding to these issues, the author argues that public international law seeks (...) to establish and institutionalise a system of authoritative judgment whereby the conditions by which a community of states can co-exist and co-operate are ensured. A state, in turn, must be understood as ultimately deriving legitimacy from the pursuit of the human dignity of the community it governs, as well as the dignity of those human beings and states affected by its actions in international relations. This argument is in line with a long and now resurgent Kantian tradition in legal and political philosophy. The book shows how this approach is reflected in accepted paradigm cases of international law, such as the United Nations Charter. It then explains how this approach can provide insights into the theoretical foundations of these accepted paradigms, including our understanding of the sources of international law, international legal personality and the design of global institutions. (shrink)