This volume explores law-making in international affairs. It has been compiled to celebrate the occasion of the 50th birthday of Professor Jan Klabbers, a leading international law and international relations scholar, who has made a significant contribution to the understanding of the sources of international obligations and the idea of constitutionalism in international law. Inspired by Professor Klabbers wide-ranging interests in international law, his determined disregard for disciplinary boundaries and his often provocative views, the book looks at law-making in a colourful variety of different ways and occasionally seeks to push the envelope in terms of what it means to think and write about law and its making. The book includes contributions from respected legal scholars including Eyal Benevisiti, James Crawford, Malgozia Fitzmaurice, Martti Koskenniemi, Bruno Simma and Geir Ulfstein.
The first part of the book attempts to situate, on the most abstract and theoretical level, the notion of law-making into a philosophical, historical, social, linguistic and literary context. The second section looks at some of the processes of law-making, the institutions involved and the sometimes unclear divide between law and non-law. Topics covered include: global administrative law; law-making in the EU; regionalism and international law, domestic legal systems and international law; and informal law-making and the changing nature of law in global governance. The third and final part of the book the problems of law-making in particular areas, such as human rights, the law of the sea, environmental law, the law of state responsibility, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law. But while these contributions do look at the 'substance', as it were, of international law, they raise more general concerns, such as the relationship between law-making and the application of law, the role of various institutions and the potential for conflict between them and the characteristics of the formal sources of international law.
