International Legal Positivism in a Post-Modern World provides fresh perspectives on one of the most important and most controversial families of theoretical approaches to the study and practice of international law. The contributors include leading experts on international legal theory who analyse and criticise positivism as a conceptual framework for international law, explore its relationships with other approaches and apply it to current problems of international law. Is legal positivism relevant to the theory and practice of international law today? Have other answers to the problems of international law and the critique of positivism undermined the positivist project and its narratives? Do modern forms of positivism, inspired largely by the theoretically sophisticated jurisprudential concepts associated with Hans Kelsen and H. L. A. Hart, remain of any relevance for the international lawyer in this 'post-modern' age? The authors provide a wide variety of views and a stimulating debate about this family of approaches.

The first comprehensive study of international legal positivism and how this theory operates in twenty-first-century international legal scholarship.

This chapter, a contribution to a book on International Legal Positivism in a Post-Modern World, gauges the potential for mutually enriching interactions between international legal positivism and legal realism. It first describes the encounter between legal positivism and legal realism in the U.S. legal academy and then proceeds to discuss the rise of a new legal realism in international legal theory. In a concluding section, the chapter assesses the compatibilities and tensions between the new international legal realism and the new international legal positivism.With its forthright embrace of the inescapability of uncertainty in law, the new international legal positivism adopts a sceptical position very similar to legal realism. However, this chapter contends, the new international legal positivism still requires a realist supplement in order to provide a fuller understanding of the way in which legal norms interact with non-legal factors and to help us describe, predict and analyse the behaviour of actors in international affairs. At the same time, new international legal realists can learn from the sceptical attitude towards sources of law that new international legal positivists have developed. The two movements can be symbiotic if brought into closer dialogue. Nonetheless, this chapter concludes with a dose of pessimism about the capacity of any of the currently available theories of international law to fully assimilate the complexities of both postmodern theory and postmodern global society into a comprehensive theory of international law in the postmodern world.

A theme of growing importance in both the law and philosophy and socio-legal literature is how regulatory dynamics can be identified (that is, conceptualised and operationalised) and normative expectations met in an age when transnational actors operate on a global plane and in increasingly fragmented and transformative contexts. A reconsideration of established theories and axiomatic findings on regulatory phenomena is an essential part of this discourse. There is indeed an urgent need for discontinuity regarding what we (think we) know about, among other things, law, legality, sovereignty and political legitimacy, power relations, institutional design and development, and pluralist dynamics of ordering under processes of globalisation and transnationalism. Making an important contribution to the scholarly debate on the subject, this volume features original and much-needed essays of theoretical and applied legal philosophy as well as socio-legal accounts that reflect on whether legal positivism has anything to offer to this intellectual enterprise. This is done by discussing whether global and transnational cultural, socio-political, economic, and juridical challenges as well as processes of diversification, fragmentation, and transformation (significantly, de-formalisation) reinforce or weaken legal positivists’ assumptions, claims, and methods. The themes covered include, but are not limited to, absolute and limited state sovereignty; the ‘new international legal positivism’; Hartian legal positivism and the ‘normative positivist’ account; the relationship between modern secularisation, social conventionalism, and meta-ontological issues of temporality in postnational jurisprudence; the social positivisation of human rights; the formation and content of jus cogens norms; feminist critique; the global and transnational migration of principles of justice and morality; the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties rule of interpretation; and the responsibility of transnational corporations.

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? Whats 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 perception. The main aim of this book is to provide interested scholars, practitioners, and students of international law and other disciplines with an introduction to various international legal theories, their genealogies, and possible critiques. By providing an analytical approach to international legal theory, the book encourages readers to enhance their sensitivity to these different approaches and to consider how the presuppositions behind each theory affect analysis, research, and practice in international law. International Law Theories is intended to assist students, scholars, and practitioners in reflecting more generally about how knowledge is formed in the field.

The Nature of International Law provides a comprehensive analytical account of international law within the prototype theory of concepts.

While espionage between states is a practice dating back centuries, the emergence of the internet revolutionised the types and scale of intelligence activities, creating drastic new challenges for the traditional legal frameworks governing them. This book argues that cyber-espionage has come to have an uneasy status in law: it is not prohibited, because spying does not result in an internationally wrongful act, but neither is it authorised or permitted, because states are free to resist foreign cyber-espionage activities. Rather than seeking further regulation, however, governments have remained purposefully silent, leaving them free to pursue cyber-espionage themselves at the same time as they adopt measures to prevent falling victim to it. Drawing on detailed analysis of state practice and examples from sovereignty, diplomacy, human rights and economic law, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the current legal status of cyber-espionage, as well as future directions for research and policy. It is an essential resource for scholars and practitioners in international law, as well as anyone interested in the future of cyber-security.