In this brief paper, provoked in part by Pieter Kooijmans' The Doctrine of the Legal Equality of States, the author returns to his 2004 book, Great Powers and Outlaw States and reads it in light of criticisms by two sympathetic interlocutors, and in the shadow of the 2003 Iraq War and more recent efforts to conceptualise the possibilities of constraining hegemony (when it threatens the ‘rule of law’) and promoting it (when it might secure some superseding political ends).