This book employs insights from literature and the humanities to explore how international law can, once again, become a compelling language for our times. It argues that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and that they may be re-enabled by speaking international law in new and original ways.

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.

• 1: A plea for new international laws


• 2: The sentimental lives of international lawyers


• 3: International law's comic disposition


• 4: "Bluebeard on trial": the experience of bathos


• 5: An uncertain style: after method in international legal history


• 6: A declaration on friendly relations


• 7: Gardening, instead, or, of pastoral international law


• Postlude: last thoughts on sentimentality