When the law is able to distinguish clearly between the different categories of treaties in terms of purpose and function, it will have taken an important step forward. .. When that stage is reached, those treaties which are immediately available to a new State will, it is safe to predict, be so because of their purpose and function and not because of a 'succession' from the parent State; it is precisely because law at present makes provision only for succession that the decision to become party or not is primarily a political one. Seen in this context, then, there is much more to be said for the 'pick and choose' attitude than has been commonly assumed.

A new genre of scholarly writing has emerged in recent years in the field of what one can broadly call critical international theory. Its principal defining feature is an intense preoccupation with the phenomenon of the so-called ‘new world order’, which it tries to explain and describe through an analytical lens constructed primarily around two ideas: the idea of ‘empire’ and the idea of ‘imperial law’. In this article I attempt to provide a brief overview of this genre, which for the sake of simplicity I shall call henceforth the ‘new imperial law’ or NIL genre, and to reflect critically on its underlying ideological dynamics.

An increasing number of international law scholars over the last few years have started to turn their attention to the study of political economy. To what extent can this trend be considered an indication of an underlying ‘disciplinary turn’? How should one understand the phenomenon of disciplinary turns? The answer we propose to this question in this article proceeds from the assumption that not all disciplinary shifts follow the same logic. Unlike the linguistic or the historical turn, the turn to political economy in contemporary international law does not represent an exercise in inter-disciplinary exploration. The concept of political economy used in international law has very little to do with the actual discipline of political economy. It is much more diffuse and unfocused in theoretical terms. What gives it its essential sense of identity is not any form of distinct methodological orientation, but rather its basic usefulness as a potential marker of critical self-distancing vis-à-vis the mainstream international law tradition and its ideological function as a mediating device for the expression of a deep-seated concern about the structural injustices of modern capitalism.

Peter Fitzpatrick and Patricia Tuitt (eds.), Critical Beings: Law, Nation and the Global Subject, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, 226 pp. (hb).Sinkwan Cheng (ed.), Law, Justice, and Power: Between Reason and Will, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 278 pp. (pb).

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