Victorian antics : the persistence of the 'law as craft' mindset in the critical legal imagination

Abstract

At the risk of circularity, I would like to begin my review of Ntina Tzouvala's innovative monograph Capitalism as Civilisation (CaC) with a reference to one of her own book reviews. Or, perhaps more precisely, to the reaction a commentator had on Twitter to her review of the edited volume World Trade and Investment Reimagined. Our Twitter user (who will remain anonymous), used Tzouvala's book review to put forward an argument on why mainstream international legal scholarship (MILS) should engage with what he saw as Tzouvala's exemplary summary of the core of a 'critical legal studies' (CLS) approach to international economic law. Even if we suspend for a second the problematic issue of MILS claiming the prerogative to engage with CLSrelated work (a privilege rarely granted to us on the 'socio-critical spectrum'), I argue there is one further problem with this tweet: it assumes one can label Tzouvala's work as part and parcel of a garden-variety CLS. This is surprising, not only because CLS and its international law cousin, the 'New Approaches to International Law' movement (NAIL), have been pronounced dead by their own founders for quite some time now, but also because Tzouvala's work is one of the many efforts undertaken by emerging scholars to go beyond the limitations of the CLS project, while also building on its legacy and struggles.