Two errors: 1. Law's constitutive power is everywhere, even (or especially) where most would prefer to speak of "legal black holes". 2. Legality is always and necessarily a peripheral phenomenon, secondary to and derivative of the political or politico-economic.
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Sorry for the late response, Chase--seriously thinking of getting off social media (or at least FB). Getting tired of it. On your question, to clarify, my own position has never been that international law can "take on a life of its own", i.e. establish itself as some sort of
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"self-actualizing" agent. That is actually precisely one of the positions--a hyper-formalist neo-naturalist position of sorts--from which I have consistently distanced myself. The central task, as I've seen it, is to capture the specificity of the legal form without fetishizing
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it. That is to say, to explain what is specific to law, and the legal form, without naturalizing it. On the one hand, you have the hyper-formalist maneuver--blow law up into some sort of internally coherent, immanently rational, "self-actualizing" system, whatever that might
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mean. On the other hand, you have the reductionist maneuver, common to various strands of (among other things) IR "realism" and vulgar Marxism--law is reducible to power through and through, and thus possessed of no autonomy or specificity. I see both positions as untenable.
End of conversation
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