Non-Legality in International Law : Unruly Law Paperback / softback

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.