Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law. By Fleur Johns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 259 pp. $99.00 cloth.

Abstract

Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law. By Fleur Johns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 259 pp. $99.00 cloth.Non-Legality in International Law is as successful as it is ambitious. Fleur Johns begins her disruption of international legal thought and practice with a simple observation: as a matter of course, when international lawyers make law, they also make non-law, which she defines as understandings of what stands opposed to or outside the reach of legal norms (p. 1). The resulting boundaries and categories-the before, the after, the below, the above, the against and the despite (p. 9)-shape the doctrines and of international law in ways that, until now, have largely been overlooked or accepted uncritically as natural or inevitable.The heart of the book is the articulation and defense of a taxonomy of non-legality in international law. Johns identifies five categories or knowledge practices of non-legality: illegality, extra- legality, pre- or post-legality, supra-legality, and infra-legality. She provides a theoretical explanation of each category or practice that explains its particular characteristics and its relationship to the other practices, and she explores how each category operates in a specific international legal context. For illegality, that context is torture. For extra-legality, it is the detention regime at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Transnational cross-border financing of development projects illustrates the concepts of pre- or post- legality, while climate change provides the setting for explaining supra-legality. For infra-legality, Johns provides a close reading of the First Responders Manual for the management of dead bodies after mass disasters.Johns does not suggest that these are the only contexts within which the various parts of her taxonomy of could apply. To the contrary, she emphasizes the nuances that allow them to overlap. Further, it is abundantly clear not only that the specific applications are representative rather than exhaustive, but also that the taxonomy itself-while plainly a significant scholarly achievement-is ultimately a set of tools. Her book is in part a call for further research and analysis, for the application and expansion of her taxonomy across the various topics that comprise contem- porary international law.Still, while each chapter is an important part of this larger structure of analysis, the individual chapters also make particular and incisive contributions to their specific topics. The chapter on torture, for example, is an important contribution to the critical assessment of modern torture discourse, including the right not to be tortured. The chapter on Guantanamo advances a bold rereading of the Schmittian decision on the exception, delink[ed] from Schmitt's fetishism of the state and the person of the sovereign ruler (p. …