Introduction: The life of international law and its concepts (original) (raw)

2019, Concepts for International Law

47AM via free access sensibilities that remain prevalent in today's legal writings, while also bringing attention to the limits, nuances and fractures in these sensibilities. Here, we offer detailed readings, criticisms and extensions of texts by Jhering, Hohfeld, Ross, Cohen, Kennedy and Koskenniemi, to name but a few. We argue that these writings offer various and contrasting aesthetic, ethical and political insights into how we live with, apprehend, think of and know international law through its concepts. These insights tend to emerge with considerable strength when we look at the tensions and differences between sensibilities side by side. Finally, it is perhaps clear by now that we intend this introduction to be a standalone piece. Nevertheless, the third section is a brief introduction to the volume itself. It outlines how we chose the concepts that comprise this volume, the types of concepts contained herein, how authors approached their given task and how we see relations between the various concepts contained in the book and the many that lie beyond its limited purview.