Fleur Johns
Address: Professor, Faculty of Law & Justice
UNSW SYDNEY NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA
W: http://www.law.unsw.edu.au/profile/fleur-johns
SSRN: http://ssrn.com/author=385449
Twitter: FleurEJ
UNSW SYDNEY NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA
W: http://www.law.unsw.edu.au/profile/fleur-johns
SSRN: http://ssrn.com/author=385449
Twitter: FleurEJ
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The introduction, entitled 'The Life of International Law and its Concepts', is a standalone piece that grapples with the relation between legal concepts, life and living in international law. First, we briefly explore the contemporary malaise in international law’s disciplinary life, in and for which this book emerges. We urge a sensibility that sees working on international law’s concepts as opening up a range of possibilities in how we may act, live, know, see and understand within and towards the discipline. Second, we offer an overview into how legal thought has, in its diversity, approached legal concepts. We aim to draw out those sensibilities that remain prevalent in today’s legal writings on concepts, whilst also pointing to the limits, nuances and fractures of these sensibilities. In this regard we offer detailed readings, criticisms and extensions of texts by Jhering, Hohfeld, Ross, Cohen, Kennedy, Koskenniemi, and Marks to name but a few. These readings primarily point to the intricate and intractable difficulties of reconciling concepts with social life. They also point to a series of shifting and entwined aesthetic, ethical and political presuppositions that dominate the various ways in which we approach legal concepts today. In showing the diversity of legal sensibilities towards legal concepts, we hope to not only open up the various possibilities and limits of these sensibilities, but to point towards the intellectual cultural resources at the modern scholar’s disposal. Third, and finally, we offer an introduction to the volume itself. Here we outline how we chose its concepts, the types of concepts contained therein, and how we see the complex relations between different concepts.
The book applies its socio-legal analysis to bring a fresh approach to understanding conflicts surrounding water governance in the Mekong River Basin. The authors describe the wide range of uses being made of legal doctrine and legal argument in ongoing disputes surrounding hydropower development in the Basin, putting to rest lingering caricatures of a single, ‘ASEAN’ way of navigating conflict. They call into question some of the common assumptions concerning the relationship between law and development. The book also sheds light on important questions concerning the global hybridization or crossover of public and private power and its ramifications for water governance. With current debates and looming conflicts over water governance globally, and over shared rivers in particular, these issues could not be more pressing.