From International Law to International Conflicts of Law: The Fragmentation of Legitimacy

This short essay, published as part of the proceedings of the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, confronts the problem of fragmentation in international law. Based on a longer paper, it challenges not only fragmentation’s conventional treatment as a technical or doctrinal problem but the very notion that there is a single international law community with a single doctrine of sources. On the contrary, the paper argues, what the problem of fragmentation reveals is that a single international law community is being replaced by separate, overlapping legal communities with significantly different views on law and legitimacy