Schultz: Life Cycles of International Law as a Noetic Unity: The Various Times of Law-Thinking

Thomas Schultz (King's College London – Law) has posted Life Cycles of International Law as a Noetic Unity: The Various Times of Law-Thinking (in International Law and Time: Narratives and Techniques, L. Pasquet, K. Polackova Van der Ploeg, & L. Castellanos Jankiewicz eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

This essay discusses different possible temporalities, or life cycles, that structure international law-making if international law is taken to be a noetic unity – a complex whole that is created by an exercise of reason and that does not exist outside of that exercise of reason. Put differently, it deals with the following question: if international law is something we create and develop through a shared understanding of what it is, what are the different salient moments in time that give a pace to the evolution of such an understanding? In answer to the question, the essay first explains that understanding law as a noetic unity allows us to make sense of the idea of law-making by law-thinking, and then identifies the following temporalities: the time of paradigm shifts; the time of struggles between competing schools of thought; the time of the formation of distinct epistemic fields; the time of the evolution of interests; and the time of the change of beliefs.