Messenger: The Development of International Law, Perception, and the Problem of Time

Gregory Messenger (Univ. of Liverpool - Law) has posted The Development of International Law, Perception, and the Problem of Time (in International Law and Time: Narratives and Techniques, L. Pasquet, K. Polackova Van der Ploeg, & L. Castellanos Jankiewicz eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

‘International law develops over time’ – an uncontroversial statement. Yet the mechanism of this development is not entirely clear. This paper suggests that the conceptual foundations of both rule-identification and rule-interpretation in international law are problematic, specifically due to ignoring the temporal dimension as we experience it. The argument set out here is as follows: discussions over the development of international law are necessarily related to the concept of change; that the concept of change necessarily contains a temporal element; and the principal tools for rule-identification and rule-interpretation in international law fail to acknowledge this temporal element and thus distort the findings of the aforementioned exercises.