International lawyers typically start with the legal. What is a legal as opposed to a political question? How should international law adapt to the unforeseen? These are the routes by which international lawyers typically reason. This book begins, instead, with the non-legal. In a series of case studies, Fleur Johns examines what international lawyers cast outside or against law – as extra-legal, illegal, pre-legal or otherwise non-legal – and how this comes to shape political possibility. Non-legality is not merely the remainder of regulatory action. It is a key structuring device of contemporary global order. Constructions of non-legality are pivotal to debate in areas ranging from torture to foreign investment and from climate change to natural disaster relief. Understandings of non-legality inform what international lawyers today do and what they refrain from doing. Tracing and potentially reimagining the non-legal in international legal work is, accordingly, both vital and pressing.
• Uses conventional legal sources to address some unconventional questions and draw some uncomfortable connections • Illuminates lawyers' roles in sustaining violence and power that international law commonly purports to counter or contain • Draws novel connections among international legal regimes, including the fields of human rights, international economic law and international environmental law
Contents
1. Making non-legalities in international law; 2. Illegality and the torture memos; 3. Black holes and the outside within: extra-legality at Guantánamo; 4. Doing deals: pre- and post-legal choice in transnational financing; 5. Receiving climate change: law, science and supra-legality; 6. Death, disaster and infra-legality in international law; Conclusion.
Reviews
'A fantastic book - at once a serious contribution to legal theory and a fascinating read. 'The exception makes the rule' we say - Johns turns that around. How does law make, un-make and manage the exception? It has become routine to find war in the filigrees of peace. Johns finds the managerial work of law in all that seems beyond its reach - the illegal, the political, the economic and the barbaric. Johns proposes a powerful new agenda for research and a caution about the common wish that all might be well were law finally 'brought to bear.' Law she tells us, is already there.' David Kennedy, Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law and Director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School
'An outstandingly rich, nuanced and well written critical treatment of the way in which international law's treatment of conditions as marginal plays a significant role in the understanding and structuring of such conditions.' Ralph Wilde, Reader in Law, University College London
'This magisterial book points the way toward a new future for international legal studies. Erudite yet original, bold yet meticulously defended, this is a text that is both critical and hopeful, in the highest sense of both terms.' Annelise Riles, Jack G. Clarke Professor of Law in Far East Legal Studies, Cornell University Law School
'Beautifully written and full of sparkling examples, this book reconfigures the landscape of international legal thought in profound and irrevocable ways.' Susan Marks, Professor of International Law, London School of Economics and Political Science
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