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The Multifaceted Notion of Time in International Law

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International Law and Time

Part of the book series: Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice ((IUSGENT,volume 101))

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Abstract

Although time forms a part of the very bedrock of international law as a legal order and fundamentally determines international law as a discipline, the relationship between time and international law has received only limited attention. To most international lawyers, time appears as simply a technical problem, and mainstream international law doctrine presents international law as essentially atemporal. However, such attitudes obscure the complex temporalities involved in international law and the choices that have underpinned them. Time in international law is profoundly multifaceted, and there is a significant intra-disciplinary diversity in the understanding of the relationship between international law and time. Nevertheless, international law and international lawyers may be said to primarily cope and engage with time in two main—albeit intertwined—ways: through the construction of narratives and through the development of legal techniques.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See eg Pedone (2001); Cassese and Weiler (1988); Craven et al (2007); some of the articles in Netherlands Yearbook of International Law vol 45 (2014) on ‘Temporariness in International Law, Wuschka et al (2019); and, most recently, McNeilly and Warwick (2022). See also the works cited in (n 2).

  2. 2.

    Significant works exploring these matters include Rosenne (1960); Nick (2017); Higgins (1997); Linderfalk (2011).

  3. 3.

    The difficulty in conceptualizing time was, of course, famously observed at the turn of the 5th century by St Augustine in Confessions, Book XI, Chapter XIV: ‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.’

  4. 4.

    Emery et al (2020).

  5. 5.

    Aristotle (2005); Emery et al (n 4) s 2.

  6. 6.

    Majumdar (2007).

  7. 7.

    Husserl (1991).

  8. 8.

    Kant (1999); Janiak (2016).

  9. 9.

    Emery et al (n 4) s 4.

  10. 10.

    Bergson (1912).

  11. 11.

    See eg Savitt (2008); Poidevin (2019); Gale (1968).

  12. 12.

    See eg Sorokin and Merton (1937); Adam (1994); Elias (1993); Hassard (1990); Šubrt (2021).

  13. 13.

    See eg Munn (1992); Greenhouse (1996; 1989); Hoskins (1997).

  14. 14.

    See eg Ost (1999); Grabham and Beynon-Jones (2019); Ranchordas and Roznai (2020).

  15. 15.

    See eg Prigogine (1980); Hawking (2016); Rovelli (2018).

  16. 16.

    Adam (n 12) 50–55.

  17. 17.

    id.

  18. 18.

    Newton (1999); Rynasiewicz (2011).

  19. 19.

    Adam (n 12) 55–57.

  20. 20.

    ibid 57–60.

  21. 21.

    Rovelli (n 15); Durrani (2018).

  22. 22.

    Adam (n 12) 15.

  23. 23.

    Geană (2016) 1072.

  24. 24.

    Rosa and Scheuerman (2009).

  25. 25.

    See eg Greenhouse (1989); Luhmann (1976); Jones (1988). See also chapter by Soave in this book, s 2.1.

  26. 26.

    Schiff and Nobles (2012).

  27. 27.

    Fontes et al (2016).

  28. 28.

    Tsao et al (2018).

  29. 29.

    Buhusi et al (2018).

  30. 30.

    cf. eg Šubrt (2021) 4 (discussing Heidegger’s concept of Dasain, our existence, which took place over time but at the same time related to time in some way and thus co-created it in a certain way); Giddens (1979) esp ch 6; Mawani (2014).

  31. 31.

    Zerubavel (1982).

  32. 32.

    See eg chapters by Schramm, Soave, Vanhullebusch, Messenger and Ellis in this volume.

  33. 33.

    See eg the Metre Convention [1875] as amended, the 1884 International Meridian Conference, and the resolutions of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and the General Conference on Weights and Measures. The International Bureau of Weights and Measures, an international organization, also calculates the international reference time scale, UTC—‘the time’ for the world. International Bureau of Weights and Measures, ‘Time’ https://www.bipm.org/en/bipm/tai/ (accessed 15 April 2020).

  34. 34.

    cf. Adam (n 12) 53.

  35. 35.

    See (n 1) and (n 2) and related text.

  36. 36.

    Adam (n 12) 1–8.

  37. 37.

    Durrani (2018).

  38. 38.

    Adam (n 12) 2.

  39. 39.

    See eg (n 5), (n 18) and (n 26) and accompanying text.

  40. 40.

    Giddens (1979) 99; Adam (n 12) 9.

  41. 41.

    See esp chapters by Wyler and Whelan, Schramm, Salojärvi, Schultz and Messenger.

  42. 42.

    See esp chapters by Waters, Soave and Vanhullebusch.

  43. 43.

    See esp chapters by Schramm, Waters, Messenger and Kastner.

  44. 44.

    See esp chapters by Salojärvi, Waters, Ellis and Kastner.

  45. 45.

    Paraphrasing Grabham and Beynon-Jones (2019).

  46. 46.

    According to Niklas Luhmann, the function of law is precisely to ‘solve a problem in relation to time’, relating occurrences to past and possible future, and reducing the uncertainty of the future by setting normative expectations. In his view, it is this temporal dimension, rather than concepts such as ‘social control’, that defines law and is key to the proper understanding of its nature. Luhmann (2004) 142–147. Consider also Shapiro’s theory of law as a ‘social planning’. Shapiro (2011).

  47. 47.

    See Rosa and Scheuerman (2009) 10.

  48. 48.

    See esp chapters by Schramm, Soave, Ellis and Kastner.

  49. 49.

    See esp chapters by Castellanos-Jankiewicz and Salojärvi.

  50. 50.

    See esp chapters by Schramm, Soave, Van der Ploeg and Ellis.

  51. 51.

    See esp chapters by Lemnitzer, Grace, Soave, Van der Ploeg and Ellis.

  52. 52.

    See esp chapters by Wyler and Whelan, Schramm and Schultz.

  53. 53.

    See, for example, the political dimension of time explored in this book by Schramm, Soave or Merkouris, whose chapters speak to the question of whose time will prevail. Legal regulation of time entails particular moral and cognitive dimensions and enforces social control, analogously to what has been identified in sociology of time. Zerubavel (1979).

  54. 54.

    This observation is consistent with that made by Adam (n 12); Grabham et al (2018).

  55. 55.

    Adam (n 12).

  56. 56.

    Adam (n 12) 6–8.

  57. 57.

    See eg Otten (2016); Lixinski (2013). see esp Lixinski (2013) and Ranganathan (2013); Slaughter (2007); Windsor (2015); Singh (2014); Cheng (2011).

  58. 58.

    See eg Lixinski (n 57) 2; Windsor (n 57) 747; Singh (n 57) 307.

  59. 59.

    Ranganathan (n 57) 31.

  60. 60.

    cf. Otten (n 57) 195.

  61. 61.

    Greenhouse (1989).

  62. 62.

    cf. Windsor (n 57) 751.

  63. 63.

    See esp chapters by Schramm, Soave, Vanhullebusch and Castellanos-Jankiewicz.

  64. 64.

    See Part V in this book.

  65. 65.

    See esp chapters by Salojärvi, Schramm, Waters and Kastner.

  66. 66.

    See esp chapters in Parts I and V in this book.

  67. 67.

    See esp chapters by Schramm and Castellanos-Jankiewicz.

  68. 68.

    Kennedy (1999).

  69. 69.

    See eg Hall (1988).

  70. 70.

    See esp chapters by Merkouris, Howse and Appleton, Palestini, Garrido-Muñoz, Messenger and Ellis.

  71. 71.

    cf. Del Mar (2015) ix. See also International Law Commission (2006), eg paras 14, 18 and 487; Michaels and Pauwelyn (2012); Peters (2017); Michaels (2020). Legal fictions, modes of legal reasoning, and maxims for resolution of normative conflicts, such as lex specialis and lex posterior, are some of the classic examples of legal techniques existing and applied in international law. For a distinct understanding of 'legal technique’, see eg Kelsen (1941) and Summers (1971).

  72. 72.

    Peters (2017); Pottage (2014).

  73. 73.

    See eg Rovira (2013).

  74. 74.

    cf. Michaels (2020).

  75. 75.

    Le Poidevin (2019). Similarly, physicist Michael Duff noted that ‘it is important to distinguish between statements about the universe we live in and statements about the human conventions we adopt to describe it’. Duff (2015).

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  1. University of Nottingham School of Law, Nottingham, UK

    Klara Polackova Van der Ploeg

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands

    Luca Pasquet

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  1. Klara Polackova Van der Ploeg
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  1. University of Nottingham School of Law, Nottingham, UK

    Klara Polackova Van der Ploeg

  2. Utrecht University School of Law, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Luca Pasquet

  3. Asser Institute for International and European Law, The Hague, The Netherlands

    León Castellanos-Jankiewicz

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Van der Ploeg, K., Pasquet, L. (2022). The Multifaceted Notion of Time in International Law. In: Van der Ploeg, K.P., Pasquet, L., Castellanos-Jankiewicz, L. (eds) International Law and Time. Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, vol 101. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09465-1_1

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