The practice of interpretation brings the law to life. It takes part in shaping and making the law, and does not just give effect to the law that is out there. To the extent that international law affects peoples’ everyday life, so does the practice of interpretation. Even more so than other fields of law, international law is in large parts the product of interpretative practice. What then is this practice of interpretation?

Interpretation is best understood as an argument about what the law means. While such an understanding of interpretation enjoys considerable common ground, it immediately begs the question of how to then understand that practice of arguing. I will distinguish four different approaches to that question in light of their strategy of critique – whether that critique is formalist, instrumentalist, realist, or immanent. In other words, what are the arguments and broader strategies with which to criticize a specific interpretation or a broader interpretative practice? This question will provide the pathway for approaching the practice of interpretation.

Around noon on 3 June 1919, nine schoolboys aged eight to seventeen walked westwards along Queen’s Road in the Central District of Hong Kong clad in their school uniforms and holding open oil-paper umbrellas made in mainland China. The umbrellas featured Chinese characters reading ‘Chinese people should buy native goods’. The boys attracted the attention of passers-by, with more than 100 joining them to form an impromptu parade.

Chapter 5 reveals how Hong Kong’s freedom of expression was defined and confined by changes in the China strategies of Britain and other world powers. The diplomat Murray MacLehose assumed Hong Kong’s governorship in 1971 with an express mandate from London to build civic pride and raise living standards in Hong Kong to maximise the British bargaining position in negotiations over Hong Kong’s future with a post-Mao regime. In addition to the well-known expansion of social services and efforts to combat crime and corruption, MacLehose’s governorship also featured a hitherto understudied loosening of media control. Yet behind the overt building of a free city were the covert surveillance of political activists and unchanged draconian laws of political censorship that were used to crack down on anti-government dissent whenever it overstepped the government’s political red lines.

Chapter 3 shows how the loss of China to communism hugely increased the complexity of operating effective media censorship. The colonial government could no longer rely solely on pre-emptive daily vetting to contain undesirable content and comments. During the second half of the twentieth century, political censorship of the media and education sector was facilitated and supplemented by large-scale surveillance operations carried out through a collaborative network of local departments informed by global intelligence collected through London and British embassies around the world. Intelligence collected by this network allowed the colonial government to nip trouble in the bud, and resulted in a number of ‘troublemakers’ (including journalists, editors, publishers, teachers, students and principals) being arrested, detained and even deported without trial without any due regard to whether such actions were lawful. This chapter provides a comprehensive account of such surveillance and censorship operations targeting the media and education sector from the late 1940s to the late 1950s against the backdrop of rising Cold War tensions and the new Communist China’s relations with the world.

This chapter aims at shedding light on the curious roles performed by the idea of international legal positivism in international legal thought. This chapter first elaborates on some of the common representations of international legal positivism that have allegedly led to its demise and motivated international lawyers to refrain from declaring any affinity with international legal positivism. This is the claim that international legal positivism is dead. In substantiating that claim, this section provides a sketch of five of the main features of international legal positivism as it is commonly understood in the literature (Section 3.2). This chapter then argues that most of the supposed features of international legal positivism are not specific to this supposed tradition of thought, or are simply imaginary. This is the claim that international legal positivism is empty (Section 3.3). In a third part, the chapter goes on to discuss the extent to which international legal positivism continues to be presented as a dominant approach despite few international lawyers declaring themselves positivists.

Chapter 4 details the encroachment of the government’s silencing machine on Hong Kong citizens’ daily lives at the height of the Cold War. The period from the 1950s to the 1960s saw CCP cultural infiltration into various sectors of Hong Kong in an attempt to propagate anti-colonial patriotic ideas and communist ideologies. The CCP not only published, directly or indirectly, newspapers, books and magazines in Hong Kong, but also sponsored schools and film studios and staged theatrical performances. Together with the co-existence of KMT supporters and intelligence agents of other world powers in the colony, Hong Kong became an important ideological battleground of the Cold War in Asia. The colonial government responded by hardening its monitoring of newspapers and schools, suppressing them when necessary. It also monopolised the preparation of news bulletins for radio broadcasting and imposed political censorship on radio entertainment programmes, films and theatrical performances. Radical movements of the KMT and CCP also led to the two most violent riots in colonial Hong Kong history, in 1956 and 1967, respectively, in which a large number of political dissidents were deported, detained without trial and imprisoned for speech offences.

Global legal pluralism, unlike many of the theoretical approaches explored in this volume, takes into view not just international law as such but inquires into the broader universe in which traditional international law, understood primarily as inter-state law, is embedded. It starts from the observation that in today’s global order multiple normativities – domestic, regional and international, formal and informal, private and public – interact and that this interaction is important for understanding the shape of the overall order. Global legal pluralism thus seeks to theorize the ways in which interactions between different normativities take place and their implications for a more general account of the structure of the global legal order. Some pluralists writing in this vein take a more analytical, others a more normative approach, but they all seek to capture situations in which law consists not of one, unitary legal order, but of a multiplicity of suborders with potentially competing claims to authority.

Although the term Global Administrative Law (GAL) first appeared in the twenty-first century, administrative law has existed at international level since at least the late nineteenth century.

Chapter 6 traces the trajectory of a renewed consciousness of the rule of law and various freedoms in the final decade of colonial rule and unpacks the geopolitical concerns and motivations of the British government in de-silencing Hong Kong before the handover in 1997. The conclusion in 1984 of negotiations between Britain and China on the reversion of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to the latter marked the opening of an era of liberalistic rule of law and individual freedoms in Hong Kong. Laws and regulations that had been used to suppress free speech, control publication and prosecute political protesters were loosened or repealed one after another in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hong Kong’s first statute expressly recognising freedom of speech, assembly and association was passed only in 1991, just six years before the colonial era came to an end. Not only were laws and senior judicial appointments liberalised in the last decade of British rule, but the 1980s and 1990s also witnessed unprecedented levels of public discussion of, and official and media narratives on, the importance of free speech and the rule of law to Hong Kong.

It is the nature of all law books, and edited books in particular where authors are constrained in the space available to them, that oftentimes readers, if they could, would love to put a question, seek a clarification, or even contest one or more propositions in what they read.

My role here is to be a “Consul of the Readers” and to put such questions to some of the contributors to this excellent volume. The book is interesting and timely: finding side by side an array of different theory approaches to international law. The authors did not have the benefit of seeing the whole when writing their specific contributions – and maybe only few readers will take the time to read the book cover to cover. My questions to the various authors are, however, informed not only by the specific contributions but by the perspective of seeing the individual trees and the forest as a whole.

Many elements of current positive public international law (PIL) originated in theories of natural law, including both rules – of the law of the sea and of war, of refugee and asylum law – and constitutive conceptions of sovereignty. Several scholars argue that PIL has improved upon and replaced those origins, leaving the old natural law theories dead. PIL has come of age – indeed, laments about the need for natural law to fill its lacunae are replaced by frustrations about PIL’s ungoverned growth and fragmentation. Some say it is time for PIL to kick the ladder of natural law away.*

This chapter seeks to give voice to the other side. Proclamations of the death of natural law theories are premature. More plausible versions of natural law theory may still contribute as PIL continues to evolve, by treaty agreements and interpretations.

To be sure, many historical natural law theories are implausible by our standards.