Abstract
The authors in this issue of Law and Contemporary Problems explore the everyday lives of international law. More specifically, the authors theorize and investigate select "practices" of the International Criminal Court (ICC), by which I mean recurrent and meaningful work activities—social or material—that are performed in a regularized fashion and that have a bearing, whether large or small, on the operation of the ICC. By conceiving the ICC as a bundle of practices rather than as a unitary actor whose performance is primarily governed by politics, I seek to re-direct the existing literature on the much debated international organization, which has largely failed to engage, both theoretically and empirically, with the inner workings of the sizable bureaucracy based in The Hague—and the many organizational, cultural, and other cleavages that run through it and that have had a more than random institutional effect on international adjudication. In this foreword I give a brief account of the theoretical foundations on which this issue of Law and Contemporary Problems rests, then provide an overview of the empirical investigations. I close by briefly sketching avenues for further research.
Citation
Jens Meierhenrich,
Foreword,
76 Law and Contemporary Problems
i-x
(2014)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol76/iss3/1