Chapter two deals with the impossibility to account for the rise of a rule of customary law. I was once more confronted with this problem when I read the ILC Report on the identification of rules of customary law. The report contains a courageous attempt to develop a methodology to identify such rules in an objective way. However, along the way, many of the age-old problems regarding the existence and rise of rules of customary law reappear. The impossibility of grounding a method for customary law, I argue, has to do with the repetitive nature of this body of law. Rules of customary law only exist in and through restatements that present them as already valid. To get a better grasp of the kind of repetitive logic that drives customary law, I compare it to the logic of repetition at work in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In both cases, what is essential is and must remain absent; it is nevertheless made operative through acts of repetition and representations. Yet, customary law is also radically different as it employs what Kierkegaard called "repetition forward," a form of repetition that comes with change and transformation over time.

Chapter four discusses the Tallinn Manual as a "restatement" of international law. The restatements in the Tallinn Manual were deemed necessary because specific positive law was lacking. Yet, they were also presented as neutral reproductions of rules already in existence. This led me into the recurring topic of this book: the dialectical relation between repetition and something that is absent, unattainable or unspeakable. However, in this chapter, I add another dimension to the analysis of repetition in international law. After all, the restatements occur in a very specific format, the manual. Through a comparison between the Tallinn Manual, consumer manuals and manuals of etiquette, I try to get a better grip on the inherent tensions that come with restatements of international law in the form of a "manual."

Chapter six grew out of my curiosity about a term that appears in the preamble of the ICC Statute: unimaginable atrocities. If the court is indeed called to fight "unimaginable atrocities," how is it possible that considerable parts of the same statute are devoted to spell out and, in great detail, how these crimes should be defined? The chapter combines my curiosity about the ICC Statute with my questions about the use of film in legal education. Following Shoshana Felman, I argue that the ICC Statute should be read as pointing to the limits of what can be articulated in legal language. The unimaginable or unspeakable cannot, by definition, be captured in legal categories. However, it is possible to suggest what it means for something to be unimaginable. This is where art, including film, can play a role. The biggest part of the chapter is devoted to films that use reenactments to show what it means not to be able to fully articulate and understand historical trauma. The films, I argue, function as a reminder of the importance of the term used in the ICC preamble: the unimaginable atrocities that point to the limits of what law can articulate and achieve.

Chapter five is the most programmatic of all. It grew out of uneasiness about my role as coach of teams participating in international moot court competitions. These competitions claim to bring litigation practice into legal education. However, although I see the value of mooting, I increasingly felt that these competitions were neither reflecting practice nor what academic training should be about. The chapter is an attempt to articulate my uneasiness as well as to come up with an alternative. It contains a critique on international moot court competitions, based on a comparison between two traditions of rehearsing in European theatre. The first understands rehearsing as mimicking an ideal model as closely as possible. Most existing international moot court competitions, I argue, fit this tradition. The second is the Brechtian tradition, which understands rehearsing as experimenting an echo of Kierkegaard’s notion of "repetition forward." In the last part of the chapter, I rethink international moot court competitions along Brechtian lines. Instead of training students to outperform others according to pre-fixed criteria, I seek to develop a moot noncompetition, which brings students and staff together in a common experimental environment where the boundaries of litigation are probed.

Chapter three starts from the surprise I felt when I first read a Security Council resolution. What does it mean to begin a resolution by recalling, reiterating, reconfirming or recognizing previous resolutions? In order to make sense of such beginnings, I compare preambles of Security Council resolutions to prologues in theatre plays as well as to preambles in Babylonian codes. Acts of recalling, I argue, are radically different from the decision that follows. The decision constitutes a cutoff in time, a break with the past and a pointer to the future. Decisions, in other words, present a new beginning, a lack of continuity. To recall, reiterate, recognize or reaffirm is to do the opposite: to indicate that resolutions have begun well before they were adopted. In that sense, acts of recalling seek to fill the gap that is created by a beginning, not unlike prologues do. However, preambles to Security Council resolutions cannot escape the dialectics of repetition. They do not innocently present the past as it is, but rather retake it in light of what is to follow. This means they come with their own breaks and gaps, which are filled by yet further acts of repetition.

Chapter one starts from my embarrassment when teaching sources of international law. Following conventional wisdom, I inform students that international law is grounded on a limited set of sources. However, at some point, I also have to explain that it is possible for new sources of international law to emerge. How is this possible, given that international law is grounded on a limited set of sources? I try to deal with this uneasiness by comparing discourses on sources to rituals that prevail in what I call "cyclical societies," organized around the belief in the eternal return of transcendental ideas, acts or events. To apply sources, I argue, is to perform a double act of repetition. First, historically contingent events are turned into manifestations of pregiven and repeatable categories. Second, sources are used as placeholders for something that will always escape positive international law: the foundational categories that underlie the sources of law. These foundational categories, I argue, work somewhat like celestial Gods in cyclical societies: Most of the time they stay dormant and aloof, but they can always be called upon in exceptional times.

To begin a book is to perform a paradoxical act. There is always a lead-up to the beginning, a history before the history of the start. This book, for example, grew out of my experiences with problems and puzzles in international law over the past few years – or longer. It began when I first looked up the text of a Security Council resolution. I expected to find decisions and recommendations, in line with the formal powers and mandate of the Council. And indeed, I found all of these things. However, I was most of all struck by something else: the lengthy preamble of the resolution, which extensively recalled, reiterated, reaffirmed and recognized previous resolutions. What was going on here? What does it mean to begin a resolution by calling upon the past, by reaffirming and recognizing your own previous work? This book began when I was coach of a team of students for an international moot court competition. I had been coaching and supervising moot court teams for a couple of years and, while I truly enjoyed the experience, there was also always a yawning uneasiness about it. During the competition there was little to no room for the critical and reflexive attitude that I try to foster in the rest of my teaching. Instead, I largely followed the format of the competition during the preparatory sessions, mostly focusing on the strategic use of international law in order to win a case. Increasingly, I started to wonder whether there might be different, more reflexive and experimental ways to rehearse international law. This book began when I first saw Rithy Panh’s documentary films on the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. I was especially moved by the reenactments of traumatic experiences that were shown on screen. Watching these reenactments gave me a different sense of one of the core concepts of the Statute of the International Criminal Court: “unimaginable atrocities.” Panh’s films made me wonder whether the pictured reenactments might have something important to say about that which the International Criminal Court labels as “unimaginable” and others as “unspeakable.”

This chapter looks at the abuse and regulation of schools. It begins with a brief history of religion and education law before examining the Trojan Horse Affair which began in 2014 and reverberates today. An extraordinary volume of disinformation encrusts this series of events, which is here related via an outline of the salient facts as drawn from official reports and court cases, with minimal reference to newspaper articles and academic commentary. The related issues of illegal schools and unregulated madrassas are touched on. The theoretical discussion illustrates that liberal individualism views education as a means to emancipate the individual into secularism, while multiculturalism treats it as a means to preserve and perpetuate minority cultures. It concludes that these perspectives fail to take schools seriously as institutions whose primary purpose is to provide as many British children as possible with a good education. The pluralist response points to what the Trojan Horse Affair and education law are really about: ensuring that every school, regardless of classification, is properly regulated, well-governed and capable of rebuffing any threat to its good functioning.

This chapter examines the link between election fraud and British Muslim populations. It begins with a brief history of electoral fraud from the earliest times to draw out the recurring challenges and past attempts to meet them. This is followed by an overview of the workings of modern election fraud encompassing systemic vulnerabilities, opportunities and mechanisms as well as the attendant statistical difficulties. This sets the phenomenon in context and explains the nature of its association with South Asian Muslims. The chapter proceeds with a theoretical discussion of the ways in which election fraud can be interpreted and addressed through law. It notes that a liberal individualistic approach can justify strong safeguards against individual wrongdoing but struggles to account for the collective dimensions of elections, while multiculturalism pays greater heed to the importance of groups but suffers from an indiscriminate understanding of the various types. The chapter concludes with a pluralist response which systematises the individual and group elements of the democratic process before developing an historically informed programme for practical reform.

The general introduction sets out how the book differs from standard studies of the titular subjects, its objectives, methods and structure. It sets out three main ways in which the concept of religion is defined: normative political religion, descriptive sociological religion and evaluative legal religion. It notes that English law tends to be blind to the forms that religion, and especially Islam, takes and this can cause problems both for the faithful and for wider society. It identifies the theoretical models that shape the book – liberal individualism, multiculturalism and classical pluralism – and how these will be deployed and to what end. It identifies the institutions that will be discussed in relation to British Islam – banks, charities, schools, elections, clans – and sets out the hopes of the book as a whole.

Philosophy of law has long been in a state of deadlock, unable to make progress in solving the puzzle of law’s authority – that law is both a matter of right and might. This book seeks to break the deadlock.1 It does so by going back to the work of HLA Hart, who in 1958 set solving that puzzle as the main task for legal theory in ‘Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals’ with his lapidary claim: ‘Law surely is more than the gunman situation writ large’.2 I argue that the task can be accomplished through exploiting the rich resources in Hart’s own legal theory. But I do so in a way closed to him by the idea he claimed was central to his tradition in his 1958 manifesto for legal positivism: his Separation Thesis that there is no necessary connection between law and morality.