The Sentimental Life of International Law Literature, Language, and Longing in World Politics

The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being, and speaking that might help us achieve that aim. This book asks how international lawyers might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm's, both difficult and impossible. It suggests that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and proposes that they may be re-enabled by speaking different sorts of international law, or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways.

In this methodologically diverse and unusually personal account, Gerry Simpson brings to the surface international law's hidden literary prose and offers a critical and redemptive account of the field. He does so in a series of chapters on international law's bathetic underpinnings, its friendly relations, the neurotic foundations of its underlying social order, its screened-off comic dispositions, its anti-method, and the life-worlds of its practitioners. Finally, the book closes with a chapter in which international law is re-envisioned through the practice of gardening. All of this is put forward as a contribution to the project of making international law, again, a compelling language for our times.

Gerry Simpson is a Professor of International Law at LSE. He previously held the Sir Kenneth Bailey Chair of Law at Melbourne Law School and studied law at the University of Aberdeen, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). He is the author of Great Powers and
Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004) (awarded the American Society of International Law's annual prize, and translated into several languages) and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Polity, 2008). Gerry is currently co-directing a project on the Cold War (with
Matt Craven and Sundhya Pahuja) and writing a meditation on nuclearism entitled The Atomics: Life, Love and Death at the End of the World.