Arctic legal tides : the politics of international law in the Northwest Passage ...

• Main Author: Nankivell, Justin DeMowbray
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2010
• Subjects: Arctic; Northwest Passage; Northwest passage
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0071080; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0071080

The politics of international law should be seen as a constant condition of international affairs within which the practices of international law and world politics unfold. This work aims to uncover several ways to understand the politics of international law, and in particular, to understand how law and politics interact within extended foreign policy sequences. These long foreign policy episodes are generally centered on a particular component, or body of, international law. Yet they are also subject to numerous elements and functions of international law which give form and content to a state’s policy development. These include complex compliance decisions, repeated public justifications over the terms of legal validity, learning what the law requires to meet thresholds of compliance, and states’ engaging in forms of legal rhetoric known as creative legal arguments: legal justifications that attempt to change international law when states face difficult policy choices. These various areas of international ...