¹ E.g., Charlesworth, Hilary, International Law: A Discipline of Crisis, 65 Mod. L. Rev. 377 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Orford, Anne, The Destiny of International Law, 17 Leiden J. Int’l L. 441, 443 (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² The idea that international law has failed and needs to be saved from its own failure dates back to at least the post-World War I scholarship. See generally Desautels-Stein, Justin, Chiastic Law in the Crystal Ball: Exploring Legal Formalism and Its Alternative Futures, 2 London Rev. Int’l L. 263 (2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ See generally Singh, Sahib, Appendix 2: International Law as a Technical Discipline: Critical Perspectives on the Narrative Structure of a Theory, in Jean D’Aspremont, Formalism and the Sources of International Law: A Theory of the Ascertainment of Legal Rules 236, 236 (2013), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2270415 Google Scholar.

⁴ Frédéric Mégret has argued that events like 9/11 create an “irresistible pressure [for international lawyers] to rise to the event,” to avoid being “exiled to the labour camps of dreamers and utopians for decades to come.” Mégret, Frederic, Justice in Times of Violence, 14 Eur. J. Int’l L. 327, 331 (2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ D’Amato, Anthony, Groundwork for International Law, 108 AJIL 650 (2014)Google Scholar.

⁶ Id. at 652. For a different attempt to move away from consent in the theory of sources, see Klabbers, Jan, The Concept of Treaty in International Law 245–50 (1996)Google Scholar; D’Aspremont, supra note 3, at 185 (arguing that consent should no longer be considered the primary treaty-ascertainment criterion).

⁷ D’Amato, Anthony, International Law as an Autopoietic System, in Developments of International law in Treaty Making 335 (Wolfrum, Rüdiger & Röben, Volker eds., 2005)Google Scholar.

⁸ See Koskenniemi, Martti, Law, Teleology and International Relations: An Essay in Counterdisciplinarity, 26 Int’l Rel. 3, 5 (2012)Google Scholar.

⁹ Luhmann, Niklas, Law as a Social System, 83 NW. U. L. Rev. 136, 139 (1989)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ In this respect, it has been claimed that autopoiesis “has dethroned the ‘subject’ in its claim to be unique in its self-referentiality.” Id. at 137.

¹¹ E.g., d’Aspremont, Jean, The International Law of Recognition: A Reply to Emmanuelle Tourme-Jouannet, 24 Eur. J. Int’l L. 691 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² See Fischer-Lescano, Andreas & Teubner, Gunther, Regime-Collisions: the Vain Search for Legal Unity in the Fragmentation of Global Law, 25 Mich. J. Int’l L. 999 (2004)Google Scholar; see also Luhmann, supra note 9, at 136.

¹³ Luhmann, supra note 9, at 148.

¹⁴ D’Amato, supra note 5, at 650.

¹⁵ All four of D’Amato’s axioms are presented as describing basic requirements of the international legal system as well as components of the theories of the self-preserving international legal system, while the propositions are meant to illustrate the sorting process that the system imposes on all potential legal rules that strive to become part of the system. This intricate construction is both deductive and inductive as both the axioms and the propositions seem postulated and inferred from another postulate. Such oscillations between deductive and inductive moves are certainly not unprecedented in the categories and constructs of international legal scholarship. International law is replete with doctrines that blend deduction and induction. A good example of this phenomenon is the account of how customary international law arises. See Jean d’Aspremont, Customary International Law as a Dance Floor: Part I, EJIL: TALK! (Apr. 14, 2014), at http://www.ejiltalk.org/customary-international-law-as-a-dance-floor-part-i; Jean d’Aspremont, International Law as a Dance Floor: Part II, EJIL: TALK! (Apr. 15, 2014), at http://www.ejiltalk.org/customary-international-law-as-a-dance-floor-part-ii; see also Worster, William Thomas, The Inductive and Deductive Methods in Customary International Law Analysis: Traditional and Modern Approaches, 45 Geo. J. Int’l L. 445 (2014)Google Scholar; Talmon, Stefan A. G., Determining Customary International Law: the ICJ’s Methodology Between Induction, Deduction and Assertion, 25 Eur. J. Int’l L. (forthcoming 2014)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Eyal Benvenisti, Comments on the Systemic Vision of National Courts as Part of an International Rule of Law, Jerusalem Rev. Legal Stud., Apr. 2012, at 42.

¹⁷ Somek, Alexander, The Indelible Science of Law, 7 Int’l J. Const. L. 424, 439 (2009)Google Scholar (“Every case is its own small system of legal science.”); see also Simpson, Gerry, On the Magic Mountain: Teaching Public International Law, 10 Eur. J. Int’l L. 70, 75 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (“By giving international law the appearance of the common law, we hope it will be magically transformed into a system with a commensurate degree of certainty and status.”).

¹⁸ This being said, European approaches to the international legal system are far from homogenous. For example, the concept of legal system in most German international legal thought is different from that held among many French international lawyers. Compare von Bernstorff, Jochen, German Intellectual Historical Origins of International Legal Positivism, in International Legal Positivism in a Post-Modern World 50 (Kammerhofer, Jörg & d’Aspremont, Jean eds., 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with Combacau, Jean, Le droit international: bric-á-brac ou systéme?, 31 Archives De Philosophie Du Droit 85 (1986)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ See Jouannet, Emmanuelle, French and American Perspectives on International Law: Legal Cultures and International Law, 58 ME. L. Rev. 291 (2006)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Rovira, Mónica García-Salmones, Who is the System? On Commitment, Biology, and Human Beings in the Politics of “Groundwork for International Law,” 108 AJIL 689, 691 (2014)Google Scholar (highlighting some of the European overtones of D’Amato’s construction).

²¹ Root, Elihu, The Need of Popular Understanding of International Law, 1 AJIL 1, 3 (1907)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But See Bederman, David J., Appraising a Century of scholarship in the American Journal of International Law, 100 AJIL 20, 21 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² See Rob van Gestel, Hans-W. Micklitz & Miguel Poiares Maduro, Methodology in the New Legal World, at 14 (EUI Working Papers No. 2012/13, 2012), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2069872.

²³ D’Amato, Anthony, Non-state Actors f om the Perspective of the Policy-Oriented School: Power, Law, Actors and the View f om New Haven, in Participants in the International Legal System: Multiple Perspectives on Non-State Actors in International Law 64 (d’Aspremont, Jean ed., 2011)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Koskenniemi, supra note 8, at 15.

²⁵ d’Aspremont, Jean, The Politics of Deformalization in International Law, 3 Goettingen J. Int’l L. 503 (2011)Google Scholar; see also Desautels-Stein, supra note 2; Moyn, Samuel, The International Law That Is America: Reflections on the Last Chapter of the Gentle Civilizer of Nations, 27 Temp. Int’l & Comp. L. J. 399, 405 (2013)Google Scholar.

²⁶ See Desautels-Stein, supra note 2 (remarks on the New Haven Law School and the Manhattan School); see also Klabbers, Jan, The Relative Autonomy of International Law and the Forgotten Politics of Interdisciplinarity, 1 J. Int’l L. & Int’l Rel. 41 (2004–05)Google Scholar (commenting on the general inclination of international lawyers).

²⁷ See Thomas M. Franck, Fairness in International Law and Institutions 6 (1995).

²⁸ See David J. Bederman, the Spirit of International Law 3 (2002) (discussing this aspect of the turn to legitimacy).

²⁹ On the Manhattan School, and especially Thomas Franck, see Symposium: Assessing the Work of the International Law Commission on State Responsibility, 13 EUR. J. Int’l L. 901 (2002); see also Kennedy, David, Tom Franck and the Manhattan School, 35 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 397 (2003)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Shaffer, Gregory & Ginsburg, Tom, The Empirical Turn in International Legal Scholarship, 106 AJIL 1, 1 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Behind such discrepancies, fundamental differences exist about the nature, extent, and justification of claims to knowledge. See Rosenberg, Alexander, Philosophy of Social Science 295 (4th ed. 2012)Google Scholar.

³² This analysis is nothing groundbreaking in itself. It has been argued that realism made the interdisciplinary study of law respectable. See Neil Duxbury, Patterns of American Jurisprudence 92 (1997).

³³ D’Amato, supra note 5, at 657 (Axiom 4).

³⁴ For some critical remarks on such a move, see Rosenberg, supra note 31, at 295 (“[I]t is too easy to tailor a theory to be consistent with data that are already in.”).

³⁵ Klabbers, supra note 26; Koskenniemi, Martti, Constitutionalism as Mindset: Reflections on Kantian Themes About International Law and Globalization, 8 Theoretical Inquiries L. 9, 14 (2007)Google Scholar; see also Koskenniemi, Martti, The Mystery of Legal Obligation, 3 Int’l Theory 319 (2011 CrossRefGoogle Scholar). This aspect of D’Amato’s construction could be construed as resisting postmodernist scholarship. On the idea that autopoiesis constitutes a response to post modernism, see Cotterrell, Roger, The Politics of Jurisprudence: A Critical Introduction to Legal Philosophy 249 (2d ed. 2009)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Luhmann, supra note 9, at 148.

³⁷ This dimension has been thoroughly explored in Marxist economic theory whereby overaccumulation leads to crisis, which is a moment of destruction, allowing the system to find alternative avenues for the overaccumulated capital.

³⁸ García-Salmones Rovira, supra note 20, at 698.

³⁹ On the relevance of Kelsenian positivism today, see Jörg Kammerhofer, Hans Kelsen in Today’s International Legal Scholarship, in International Legal Positivism in A Post-Modern World, supra note 18, at 81.

⁴⁰ Koskenniemi, Constitutionalism as Mindset, supra note 35, at 10; Singh, Sahib, The Potential of International Law: Fragmentation and Ethics, 24 Leiden J. Int’l L. 23 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of the concept of auctoritatis interpositio, see Fischer, Andreas & Christensen, Ralph, Auctoritatis Interpositio: How Systems Theory Deconstructs Decisionism , 21 Soc. & Legal Stud. 93 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ García-Salmones Rovira, supra note 20, at 698 (attributing a Kelsenian character to D’Amato’s construction).

⁴² See generally Friedrich Kratochwil, Legal Theory and International Law, in Routledge Handbook of International Law 58 (David Armstrong ed., 2009); Koskenniemi, supra note 8, at 3.

⁴³ Martti Koskenniemi, Methodology of International Law, in Max Planck Encyclopediaof Public International Law (Nov. 2007), at http://opil.ouplaw.com/home/EPIL.

⁴⁴ I prefer the notion of intellectual universe rather than that of normative universe developed by Cover, Robert M., The Supreme Court 1982 Term—Foreword: Nomos and Narrative , 97 Harv. L. Rev. 4, 4–5 (1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (“We inhabit a nomos —a normative universe. We constantly create and maintain a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, of valid and void.. .. Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live.”). For a similar use of the idea of “intellectual universe,” see Mario Prost, the Concept of Unity in Public International Law 134 (2012).

⁴⁵ Pierre Bourdieu, the Field of Cultural Production 115–16, 158 (1993).

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⁴⁹ No preconceptual or even pretheoretical data exist outside any conceptual and descriptive framework. See Alasdair Macintyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 333 (1988).

⁵⁰ See Singh, supra note 3.

⁵¹ Benvenisti, supra note 16, at 43 (“The systemic vision of international law suited an evolving and meandering legal order because it provided room for both continuity and change: continuity of the basic principles like sovereignty and the doctrine of sources, and change though opportunities for state actors to adjust specific norms by practice or consent and an opportunity for judges to assert changes in the law through adjudication.”).

⁵² Since David Hume, it has been accepted that the inductive constructions upon which systems are articulated are highly contested from a methodological point of view. See Allott, Philip, Language, Method and the Nature of International Law, 1971 Brit. Y.B. Int’l L. 79, 101Google Scholar.

⁵³ Id. at 104; see also Singh, supra note 3.

⁵⁴ Coleman, Jules, The Architecture of Jurisprudence, 121 Yale L.J. 2 (2011)Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Luhmann, supra note 9, at 142.

⁵⁶ Onuf, Nicolas Greenwood, International Legal Order as an Idea, 73 AJIL 244, 266 (1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (listing an example); Brunnée, Jutta & Toope, Stephen J., Constructivism and International Law, in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations: the State of the Art 119 (Dunoff, Jeffrey L. & Pollack, Mark A. eds., 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (providing some critical remarks on constructivism in international law).

⁵⁷ Feldman, David, The Nature of Legal Scholarship, 52 Mod. L. Rev. 498, 513 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁸ See Jean d’Aspremont & Jörg Kammerhofer, Introduction: the Future of International Legal Positivism, in International Legal Positivism in A Post-Modern World, supra note 18, at 1.

⁵⁹ Emanuel Adler, Communitarian International Relations: the Epistemic Foundations of International Relations 14–17 (2005).

⁶⁰ Haas, Peter M., Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination, 46 Int’l Org. 1 (1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶¹ Réegis Debray, Transmitting Culture 5 (Eric Rauth trans., 2000).

⁶² Rasulov, Akbar, New Approaches to International Law: Images of a Genealogy, in New Approaches to International Law 151 (Beneyto, José1 María & Kennedy, David eds., 2012) (applying Debray’s insights to the critical legal studies movement)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶³ Luhmann, supra note 9, at 137.

⁶⁴ See García-Salmones Rovira, supra note 20, at 693.

⁶⁵ Bederman, David J., Constructivism, Positivism, and Empiricism in International Law, 89 Geo. L. J. 469, 471 (2001)Google Scholar (book review).

⁶⁶ See generally Peters, Anne, Realizing Utopia as a Scholarly Endeavor, 24 Eur. J. Int’l L. 533 (2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (stating that scholarship is all about the generation of theories to reduce complexity).

⁶⁷ Jean d’Aspremont, “Effectivity” in International Law: Self-Empowerment Against Epistemological Claustrophobia, AJIL Unbound (June 20, 2014), at http://www.asil.org/blogs/”effectively”-international-law-self-empowerment-against epistemological-claustrophobia (projecting international law’s complex categories on the external world).