Non-Legality in International Law
Unruly Law

Shows how international lawyers make non-law (extra-legal, illegal and other non-legal phenomena) and why this matters in global politics today.

Fleur Johns (Author)

9781107521834, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 April 2015

282 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.38 kg

'In a most novel, interesting and compelling way, Fleur Johns's new book, Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law, tests the question of the boundedness of law and legal practice and the possibilities of critique … the book is an exemplar of what it might be possible to think in international law and invites further reflection on what it might be possible to do.' Richard Joyce, Leiden Journal of International Law

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Public international law [LBB], Law [L]