Whilst the concept of jus cogens has grown increasingly more important in public international law, lawyers remain hugely divided both over what precisely confers a jus cogens status on a norm, and what this conferral implies in terms of legal consequences. In this ground-breaking book, Ulf Linderfalk clearly and succinctly explores the reasons for this divide in order to facilitate more rational and productive future discourse.

Offers a new perspective on international law and international legal argumentation: to what event is international law a belief system?

Peremptory Norms of General International Law (Jus Cogens): Disquisitions and Dispositions is a collection of contributions on various aspects of jus cogens in international law.

The Nature of International Law provides a comprehensive analytical account of international law within the prototype theory of concepts.

General Principles and the Coherence of International Lawprovides a collection of intellectually stimulating contributions from leading international lawyers to the discourse on the role of general principles in international law. Offering a comprehensive analysis of the doctrines, practices, and debates on general principles of law, the volume assesses their role in safeguarding the coherence of the international legal system. This important book addresses the relationship between principles of law and the other sources of international law, explores the interplay between principles of law and domestic and regional legal systems and the role of principles of law with regard to three specific regimes of international law: investment law, human rights law and environmental law.

Offering a new interdisciplinary approach to global justice and integrating the insights of international relations and contemporary ethics, this book asks whether the core norms of international law are just by appraising them according to a standard of global justice grounded in the advancement of peace and protection of human rights.

There has been renewed and growing interest in exploring the significant role played by law in the centralization of power and sovereignty – right from the earliest point. This timely book serves as an introduction into state theory, providing an overview of the conceptual history and the interdisciplinary tradition of the continental European general theory of the state.

Actio Popularis before International Courts and Tribunals examines actio popularis in the context of the symbiotic relationship between procedural and substantive normativity in international law. Actio popularis is an important procedural tool devised to address the challenges posed by the relativization of substantive normativity and recognition of norms established to protect collective interests in international law. Farid Ahmadov’s analysis underlines the ineffectiveness of bipolar litigation in enforcement of collective obligations in international law and the importance of introducing new procedural mechanisms to address the challenges posed by the transition from bilateralist to multilateralist normativity. The volume highlights the subtle link between interpretation of standing rules and the ways in which judicial policy concerns inform decisions of international courts and tribunals on admissibility of actio popularis.

This book gathers the contributions presented to the first edition of the Gaetano Morelli Lectures, held in the Spring of 2014 on “the Present and Future of Jus Cogens”. The first two Chapters reproduce the two general courses by Christian Tomuschat and by Pierre-Marie Dupuy. Two short Chapters, by Enzo Cannizzaro and by Beatrice Bonafé, address topics dealt with in the final seminar class.

Aesthetic philosophy and the arts offer an innovative and attractive approach to enhancing international law in support of peace.