International Law Making

Teaches how and why states make, break, and uphold international law using accessible explanations and contemporary international issues.

A concise, intellectually rigorous and politically and theoretically informed introduction to the context, grammar, techniques and projects of international law.

The global landscape has changed profoundly over the past decades. As a result, the making of international law and the way we think about it has become more and more diversified. This Research Handbook offers a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of international lawmaking today. It takes stock at both the conceptual and the empirical levels of the instruments, processes, and actors involved in the making of international law. The editors have taken an approach which carefully combines theory and practice in order to provide both an overview and a critical reflection of international lawmaking. Comprehensive and well-structured, the book contains essays by leading scholars on key aspects of international lawmaking and on lawmaking in the main issue areas. Attention is paid to classic processes as well as new developments and shades of normativity. This timely and authoritative Handbook will be a valuable resource for academics, students, legal practitioners, diplomats, government and international organization officials as well as civil society representatives.

This is a study of the principal negotiating processes and law-making tools through which contemporary international law is made. It does not seek to give an account of the traditional - and untraditional - sources and theories of international law, but rather to identify the processes, participants and instruments employed in the making of international law. It accordingly examines some of the mechanisms and procedures whereby new rules of law are created or old rules are amended or abrogated. It concentrates on the UN, other international organisations, diplomatic conferences, codification bodies, NGOs, and courts. Every society perceives the need to differentiate between its legal norms and other norms controlling social, economic and political behaviour. But unlike domestic legal systems where this distinction is typically determined by constitutional provisions, the decentralised nature of the international legal system makes this a complex and contested issue. Moreover, contemporary international law is often the product of a subtle and evolving interplay of law-making instruments, both binding and non-binding, and of customary law and general principles. Only in this broader context can the significance of so-called 'soft law' and multilateral treaties be fully appreciated. An important question posed by any examination of international law-making structures is the extent to which we can or should make judgments about their legitimacy and coherence, and if so in what terms. Put simply, a law-making process perceived to be illegitimate or incoherent is more likely to be an ineffective process. From this perspective, the assumption of law-making power by the UN Security Council offers unique advantages of speed and universality, but it also poses a particular challenge to the development of a more open and participatory process observable in other international law-making bodies.

This book explores law-making in international affairs and is compiled to celebrate the 50th birthday of Professor Jan Klabbers, a leading international law and international relations scholar who has made significant contributions to the understanding of the sources of international legal obligations and the idea of constitutionalism in international law. Inspired by Professor Klabbers’ wide-ranging interests in international law and his interdisciplinary approach, the book examines law-making through a variety of perspectives and seeks to breaks new ground in exploring what it means to think and write about law and its creation. While examining the substance of international law, these contributors raise more general concerns, such as the relationship between law-making and the application of law, the role and conflict between various institutions, and the characteristics of the formal sources of international law. The book will be of great interest to students and academics of legal theory, international relations, and international law.

The book explores the various means of making non-conventional/non-treaty law and the cross-cutting issues that they raise. Law-making by technical/informal expert bodies, Conferences of Parties, international organizations, the UN Security Council, regional organizations and arrangements and non-state actors is examined in turn. This forms the basis for the analysis of the complementarity of international treaty law, customary international law and non-traditional law-making, potential subject matters of non-treaty law-making, domestic consequences of non-treaty law-making, proliferation of actors, commissions and treaty bodies of the UN system, and International courts and tribunals.

Change and Stability in International Law-Making.

This timely book provides an accessible insight into how the concept of sustainable development can be made operational through its translation into legal terms. Understood as a multidimensional legal principle, sustainable development facilitates coherent international law making. Using this notion as an analytical lens on the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, the book considers the unresolved question of what a sustainable and coherent agricultural trade agreement could look like.