Time is a Pandora's box that international lawyers have long been reluctant to fully open. Perhaps unwilling to tackle the complexities this elusive concept presents, or loath to confront past wrongs and future threats that might arise from the fabled box, international jurists have left core questions of time and international law largely underexplored. In so doing, however, they have overlooked time and temporality as useful analytical lenses through which to gain new and deeper understandings of international law as a discipline and governance system. After all, international law is entangled with time in various and multifaceted ways. International law does not simply exist in time, having its own past, present, and future. Rather, like law generally, international law is constantly being shaped, organized, and reconstructed by time, while also creating, embedding, and perpetuating temporal standards and understandings. Yet, whereas domestic law scholars have in recent decades devoted considerable attention to the complex time-law relationship, international lawyers have so far investigated this relationship in only a limited manner, focusing primarily on doctrinal and procedural questions, while leaving many theoretical issues unaddressed.

About a decade ago, the neural network of the international financial system underwent an identity crisis. Since its establishment in 1973, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) had become the world's dominant system for transmitting information about financial transactions, handling up to 20 million messages per day across 212 jurisdictions. The Belgium-based company reached this position by providing customers with a reliable, confidential, and global system to exchange information. “[W]e have always maintained the position that we are like the internet,” Swift chief executive officer Gottfried Leibbrandt said in an October 2012 interview, “we connect everybody and we do not listen in on the conversation.” In other words, to borrow a phrase from its website, “Swift is neutral.”

As a field of practice, international human rights law (IHRL) is in constant motion. The four books under review explore the legal, political, and civic dynamics that continuously shape and reshape this vibrant area of law. In this Essay, I underscore two important trends in contemporary IHRL scholarship that these books highlight. First, these works share a strong emphasis on agency, understood as human action that makes a difference in the world, be it the agency of individuals, domestic civil society organizations, transnational organizations, or courts. Highlighting agency, rather than overarching political, economic, and social structures, in turn shifts the attention from human rights law and doctrine “in the books” to an understanding of human rights law as a purposive and dynamic practice.