Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-25wd4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T12:42:21.536Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Misreading the texts of international law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2009

Anne Orford
Anne Orford
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
Get access

Summary

When feminists deliberately and self-consciously read black letter law or critical legal scholars deliberately read judgments … in ways that such texts were generically and institutionally never meant to be read, they do it knowing that they are breaking the rules of the code, knowing that they are endeavouring to challenge those rules and to effect change by making the genres ‘mean’ differently (that is, making the genres tell a different story).

My aim in this chapter is to explain why I have chosen in this book to read legal texts about intervention ‘in ways that such texts were generically and institutionally never meant to be read’. The kind of productive misreading that I hope to develop here involves breaching some of the protocols that govern international legal scholarship, in order, as Threadgold suggests, to make these texts ‘“mean” differently’. Much legal writing in the field of intervention aims either at doctrinal exegesis, the description, development and refining of legal rules, or at studying the relationship between legal rules and the situations in which they take effect. My intention is to show that focusing only on the distinctions that legal texts make between a lawful and an unlawful intervention is to miss much of the most interesting work that those texts do.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reading Humanitarian Intervention
Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law
 , pp. 38 - 81
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×