Obligation through Practice

Abstract

Despite the many calls for bridge building between the fields of International Law and International Relations, genuinely integrative studies are few and far between. Lawyers leaven their writings with a dash of real politic here and utility maximizing there; International Relations scholars enlist the authority of legal interpretation and harvest insights into legal reasoning. But these are seldom exercises in genuine dialog, aimed at producing new theoretical perspectives, views that are more than the sum of their parts, which promise to advance understanding in both fields. Legitimacy and Legality in International Law is refreshing in this regard. Brunnee and Toope mine two complimentary strands of international legal and international relations theory to generate an ‘interactional’ theory of international law. They dig deep enough to grasp the complexities of each strand, and produce an artfully integrated amalgam of Lon Fuller’s approach to law (transplanted into the international arena) and constructivist international relations.