Overview

The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being, and speaking that might help us achieve that aim. This book asks how international lawyers might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm's, both difficult and impossible. It suggests that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and proposes that they may be re-enabled by speaking different sorts of international law, or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways.In this methodologically diverse and unusually personal account, Gerry Simpson brings to the surface international law's hidden literary prose and offers a critical and redemptive account of the field. He does so in a series of chapters on international law's bathetic underpinnings, its friendly relations, the neurotic foundations of its underlying social order, its screened-off comic dispositions, its anti-method, and the life-worlds of its practitioners. Finally, the book closes with a chapter in which international law is re-envisioned through the practice of gardening. All of this is put forward as a contribution to the project of making international law, again, a compelling language for our times.

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9780192849793

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Reviews

a formidable reassessment of the very elements, often unspoken, that compose the distinct character of international law and lawyers and how we relate to international legal life. * Andre Nunes Chaib, International Law Agendas * More importantly, Gerry Simpson invites us to think it is worth engaging in alternative modes of tackling pressing global issues. That for all the epic but deceitful accounts advanced by the governing orthodoxies, there is still some space for sentimental, blasphemous ways of reflecting on our identity and building a new vision where sentiment without illusion helps redeem international law. * Julian Huertas, International Law Agendas * Simpson's homonymous article helped open the discipline's doors to inquiries into international law's 'personal life' as not only a scientific, but sentimental enterprise. The book has not disappointed in expanding this insight * LUIZA LEAO SOARES PEREIRA, International Law Agendas *

a formidable reassessment of the very elements, often unspoken, that compose the distinct character of international law and lawyers and how we relate to international legal life. * Andre Nunes Chaib, International Law Agendas * More importantly, Gerry Simpson invites us to think it is worth engaging in alternative modes of tackling pressing global issues. That for all the epic but deceitful accounts advanced by the governing orthodoxies, there is still some space for sentimental, blasphemous ways of reflecting on our identity and building a new vision where sentiment without illusion helps redeem international law. * Julian Huertas, International Law Agendas * Simpson's homonymous article helped open the discipline's doors to inquiries into international law's 'personal life' as not only a scientific, but sentimental enterprise. The book has not disappointed in expanding this insight * LUIZA LEÃO SOARES PEREIRA, International Law Agendas *

Author Information

Gerry Simpson is a Professor of International Law at LSE. He previously held the Sir Kenneth Bailey Chair of Law at Melbourne Law School and studied law at the University of Aberdeen, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004) (awarded the American Society of International Law's annual prize, and translated into several languages) and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Polity, 2008). Gerry is currently co-directing a project on the Cold War (with Matt Craven and Sundhya Pahuja) and writing a meditation on nuclearism entitled The Atomics: Life, Love and Death at the End of the World.

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