Voitovich presents a clear and lucid discussion of the manner and form in which international economic organizations (IEOs) participate in two main stages of the international legal process: law making and law implementation. The book is based on normative instruments and fragments of practice of about fifty IEOs. In order to ensure a proper and timely realization of their normative acts, IEOs exercise a number of law implementing functions which are subject to a thorough comparative examination. The author concludes that existing IEOs, not being ideal institutional models, possess a sufficient arsenal of law implementing instruments to make a considerable impact on the international legal regulations in the economic field. The book will be of interest to academics and economic political scientists.

Based on the proceedings of two international colloquia held at the European University Institute, Florence.

The emergence of new states and independence movements after the Cold War has intensified the long-standing disagreement among international lawyers over the right of self-determination, especially the right of secession. Knop shifts the discussion from the articulation of the right to its interpretation. She argues that the practice of interpretation involves and illuminates a problem of diversity raised by the exclusion of many of the groups that self-determination most affects. Distinguishing different types of exclusion and the relationships between them reveals the deep structures, biases and stakes in the decisions and scholarship on self-determination. Knop's analysis also reveals that the leading cases have grappled with these embedded inequalities. Challenges by colonies, ethnic nations, indigenous peoples, women and others to the gender and cultural biases of international law emerge as integral to the interpretation of self-determination historically, as do attempts by judges and other institutional interpreters to meet these challenges.

As our society becomes more global, international law is taking on an increasingly significant role, not only in world politics but also in the affairs of a striking array of individuals, enterprises, and institutions. In this comprehensive study, David J. Bederman focuses on international law as a current, practical means of regulating and influencing international behavior. He shows it to be a system unique in its nature—nonterritorial but secular, cosmopolitan, and traditional. Part intellectual history and part contemporary review, The Spirit of International Law ranges across the series of cyclical processes and dialectics in international law over the past five centuries to assess its current prospects as a viable legal system. After addressing philosophical concerns about authority and obligation in international law, Bederman considers the sources and methods of international lawmaking. Topics include key legal actors in the international system, the permissible scope of international legal regulation (what Bederman calls the "subjects and objects" of the discipline), the primitive character of international law and its ability to remain coherent, and the essential values of international legal order (and possible tensions among those values). Bederman then measures the extent to which the rules of international law are formal or pragmatic, conservative or progressive, and ignored or enforced. Finally, he reflects on whether cynicism or enthusiasm is the proper attitude to govern our thoughts on international law. Throughout his study, Bederman highlights some of the canonical documents of international law: those arising from famous cases (decisions by both international and domestic tribunals), significant treaties, important diplomatic correspondence, and serious international incidents. Distilling the essence of international law, this volume is a lively, broad, thematic summation of its structure, characteristics, and main features.

Clearly and accessibly written, this new text provides a valuable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of international law and covers subjects including the history, theories and sources of international law, as well as current areas of interest such as international criminal law.

If international law is derived from the consent of States, who should be in a better position to say what has been consented to than the disputing States themselves? It seems that if the doctrine of consent is taken seriously, there would be no room for an 'objective' legal answer to the question `What is law?'. Furthermore, States do not necessarily employ the same criteria for determining the applicable law when engaged in dispute. And the doctrine of sovereignty is of very limited utility, since not all of substantive international law can be explained in terms of the atomic concept of sovereignty. This leaves consent as the mediating concept between the substantive doctrine of international law on the one hand and the actual practice of States (and others whose practice and participation in the global legal order help shape the body of international laws) on the other. Nevertheless, this is not to say that there is nothing `higher' than the actual legal claims forwarded by international actors. International law is no mere superstition, since none argue that there is no (one) legal solution. In that sense, the unity of the international legal order is preserved. The problem is that the solutions actually forwarded in dispute are too numerous and international law too abstract to serve as arbiters between the competing claims. Thus, at the level of substantive doctrine there is a fragmentation of that earlier-mentioned picture of unity. But even here, only consent can mediate between unity and fragmentation, stability and change, order and justice, legislation and revolution. The strength of international law lies in its adaptability to political, strategic and diplomatic necessities. To suggest otherwise is to depart from a picture of international law that presumes the empirical verifiability of international laws. This book has as its principal concern certain orthodoxies of `source thinking' in international law, and is aimed at working out the implications of these. It aims to show how certain theoretical conceptions have shaped the law in action, for good or ill. It will appeal to political theorists, diplomats, global decision-makers, and international lawyers who are interested in the question `What can we do with the international law that we have?', as distinct from the question `What should we do with international law?'.

"This book hypothesises that an ILI perspective offers a better explanation of the law-State behaviour relationship during international crises than rival explanations grounded in positivism, realism or functional ism. Four case studies of State behaviour - of the US, the Soviet Union and the PRC during the Korean War (1950-1953), of the US and UK during the Suez crisis (1956), of the US and the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and of the US and an alliance of Latin American States during the Dominican Republic crisis (1965) - are used to test the hypothesis. The findings confirm the greater explanatory efficacy of ILI and demonstrate that the significance of international law to foreign policy decision-making during international crises is more than that of deterring the use of force as is assumed by rival theoretical approaches grounded in a rule-book image of international law."--Back cover.

This Oxford Handbook examines the sources of international law, how the understanding of sources changed throughout the history of international law; how the main legal theories understood sources; the relationship between sources and the legitimacy of international law; and how sources differ across the various sub-areas of international law.