International Legal Fields

This essay reviews three recent collections of international legal scholarship. Demonstrating that all three volumes are organized around the tension between formalism and anti-formalism, the essay argues that no adequate account of contemporary international law can be developed without attending both to its internal normative architecture and to its receptivity to competing extralegal forces. Relying on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the essay suggests that any such account must necessarily involve a sustained investigation into the formation and operation of “international legal fields.”