international law’s comic disposition

This chapter considers irony and laughter as responses to, perhaps even an effect of, international legal solemnity. Ironic laughter, it argues, arises organically from the gap between our hopes and the abridgement of these hopes, or in the abyss between illusion and experience. These gaps will be immediately recognisable to the student of international law brought up on a steady diet of unrealised expectations and normative overreach. With this in mind, the chapter first reflects on the parallels between the dead languages of Edwardian English and the solemnities of international legalism and then, second, asks how the ironic international lawyer might chart a passage for laughter—indeed, live an ironic life—amid the dangers of sentimentality and tastelessness. The chapter ends by turning, albeit sketchily, to the rebellious, instinctive laughter of a world in which some deaths are more sacred than others—a blasphemous comedy of rebellion, associated with the Greek anti-philosopher Diogenes and the contemporary German writer Peter Sloterdijk.

the sentimental lives of international lawyers

If, to adapt a well-known international legal aphorism, international law is what international lawyers are, what, then, is an international lawyer? This chapter stages an answer to this question in three acts. In the first, it considers the absence of ‘life’ in the writing of international law and especially the way in which most international lawyers position themselves as a ‘person from nowhere’. In the second act, it documents and re-describes a recent move towards biography or micro-history or ‘life’ in the field of international law. In the final section, it describes four sentimental vices found in international legal work and reads these vices alongside the sentimentality of the late 18th-century ‘sentimental’ English novel before suggesting that there is a sentimental life available to international lawyers, through which they might weave a path between teariness (with the attendant risks of cheap sentimentality) and a too-cool dispassion (that is in danger of lapsing into an alienated technocracy).

Going by the Book: What International Law Textbooks Teach Us Not to Know

International law textbooks are one of the most powerful invisible frames of our discipline. This chapter analyses some of the most influential international law textbooks as important objects of study that shed light on both processes of social cognition and knowledge production. It examines international law textbooks as engines of sociomental control that delimit the realm of the ‘relevant’ in international law. It also highlights how textbooks’ unarticulated assumptions, silences, and implicit messages help to constitute the discipline of international law, not only in the sense of influencing what counts as international law, but also what one thinks about and what one does as an international lawyer.

Not to save, but to encounter: Fitzpatrick as transnational jurisprudent

This essay sketches the lineaments of the relationship between international law and the jurisprudence of Peter Fitzpatrick. It argues that Fitzpatrick was a model ‘transnational jurisprudent’ who accepted responsibility for the ongoing conduct of lawful relations, even as he offered a thoroughgoing critique of occidental law. For the occidentally trained international lawyer, Fitzpatrick's work offers a way to take up that responsibility by reimagining international law through its historical roots as a parochial law of encounter.

The nadir of vital interests: Hannah Arendt and the Franco-German Armistice 1940

Illusions of common interest and joint purpose falter when states choose to break up, as with the recent changes to the European Union, or according to more dangerous precipitants such as those which shaped the Franco-German Armistice 1940, 80 years ago as a detail of war. The latter bares the sudden end of the Franco-British alliance and holds an invitation from history to re-examine the troubling political, social and legal layers of the concept of the vital interests of states. That category opened to radically different interpretations for political and legal thinkers who witnessed the fall of France yet did not respond directly or immediately. Hannah Arendt’s theory of politics, conceived in the aftermath of war as a corrective to the internal fragmentation of the European nation-state, elucidates the instability of the concept of vital interests which underpinned international legal and political thought in the 1930s and 1940s and frustrates the co-operative relations between states. The problem pairs back, she says, to whether interests signify an associative technique or sword. Her invitation for legal thought is to challenge the expectation of rupture implicit in the juridical category by outlining an alternative that recovers the pacifistic function of law and implicates the international lawyer.

Study of law through language approach as adopted in teaching international lawyers at MGIMO-University

The article focuses on teaching English to international lawyers. The authors describe the approach developed and adopted in teaching legal English to international lawyers at MGIMO-University. Within the framework of this approach linguistics and jurisprudence become equivalent and equal factors in building a concise picture of the target subject — the system of the legal concepts and legal terminology of a foreign language. In the opinion of the authors this should be viewed as an important didactic goal of international lawyer training, i.e. training a professional who is not only able to fluently use foreign terminology, but, having thoroughly understood the respective extra lingual realia, contribute to a true dialogue of cultures vital to modern social interaction.