Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 11 December 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter seeks to advocate a specific avenue for reconstructing the theory of sources beyond naïve objectivism. It looks at how the theory of sources came to be crafted as a platform for the objectivizing of meaning and a bridle to crude politics, and how it failed in that liberal project. Yet, it argues thereafter that this possible failure of the classical theory of sources should not be construed as a failure of the principle of such a theory, but rather the failure of the specific (representation of the) theory of sources as it was inherited from the twentieth century and depicted by its critiques. More specifically, this chapter puts forward a social theory of sources that makes it possible to construe the theory of sources as a tradition and a practice rather than as a set of rules that operates mechanically.

Keywords: Responsibility of international organizations, Customary international law, General principles of international law, Relationship of international law and host state law, Sources of international law

Jean D’Aspremont

Jean d'Aspremont, Professor of Public International Law and Co- Director of the Manchester International Law Centre at the University of Manchester, and Professor of International Legal Theory at the University of Amsterdam

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.