This annotated bibliography, preoccupied with Anglo-American scholarship, analytically distinguishes several very different competing senses of an international community. The scholarship exemplifies a serious tension between the universalism of the international community and the particularism of state members, non-state organizations, the global markets, and excluded communities such as nomadic and indigenous peoples. A fundamental paradox has characterized the scholarship. On the one hand, the universalism of an international community includes everyone everywhere. And yet, on the other hand, historically contingent, context-specific particularities have fragmented the universality into a more realistic critique of the universality. Each of the five approaches to a sense of an international community has been preoccupied with this paradox. First, the international community has been considered a structure of texts and principles justifying judicial decisions. By grounding or taking for granted that a commonality, such as humanitas, dignity, human species, or shared values, is shared among human beings, the ambition has been to elaborate general principles and a rational methodology that intellectually transcend the contingent particularity of a state member of the community. A second image has continued this line of argument by portraying the international community as cosmopolitanism. Here, the particularism of state members in a cosmopolitanism has left the international community to be an “add-on” to the aggregate of the wills of the state members. A third image has highlighted a global civil society constituted from a network of regulatory treaties, contracts, corporations, cultural organizations, and adjudicative and administrative tribunal decisions. These three forms of an international community have led to a fourth sense of an international community. Here, there is a critique of the very idea of a universal international community. The critique has highlighted two themes: first, the exclusionary character of the international community; and second, the exclusionary international community has disguised the dark (or ant-universal human rights) moments manifested by the particularism of states. The fourth form of an international community has continued in a more affirmative tone by emphasizing how the particularity of a social-cultural ethos manifests shifts through time, raising the possibility of a universal international community grounded in a shared ethos. The final theme in recent scholarship has turned to an inquiry about the ontological character of a world before the existence of law and before the international community have taken form.

This annotated bibliography, preoccupied with Anglo-American scholarship, analytically distinguishes several very different competing senses of an international community. The scholarship exemplifies a serious tension between the universalism of the international community and the particularism of state members, non-state organizations, the global markets, and excluded communities such as nomadic and indigenous peoples. A fundamental paradox has characterized the scholarship. On the one hand, the universalism of an international community includes everyone everywhere. And yet, on the other hand, historically contingent, context-specific particularities have fragmented the universality into a more realistic critique of the universality. Each of the five approaches to a sense of an international community has been preoccupied with this paradox. First, the international community has been considered a structure of texts and principles justifying judicial decisions. By grounding or taking for granted that a commonality, such as humanitas, dignity, human species, or shared values, is shared among human beings, the ambition has been to elaborate general principles and a rational methodology that intellectually transcend the contingent particularity of a state member of the community. A second image has continued this line of argument by portraying the international community as cosmopolitanism. Here, the particularism of state members in a cosmopolitanism has left the international community to be an “add-on” to the aggregate of the wills of the state members. A third image has highlighted a global civil society constituted from a network of regulatory treaties, contracts, corporations, cultural organizations, and adjudicative and administrative tribunal decisions. These three forms of an international community have led to a fourth sense of an international community. Here, there is a critique of the very idea of a universal international community. The critique has highlighted two themes: first, the exclusionary character of the international community; and second, the exclusionary international community has disguised the dark (or ant-universal human rights) moments manifested by the particularism of states. The fourth form of an international community has continued in a more affirmative tone by emphasizing how the particularity of a social-cultural ethos manifests shifts through time, raising the possibility of a universal international community grounded in a shared ethos. The final theme in recent scholarship has turned to an inquiry about the ontological character of a world before the existence of law and before the international community have taken form.

This article examines the place of Nomadic peoples in an international constitutionalism. The article claims that an important element of a Nomadic culture is its sense of law. Such a sense of law differs from a constitutionalism which has privileged fundamental principles aimed to constrain acts of the executive arm of the State. Such a constitutionalism is shared by many contemporary domestic legal orders. Public international law also takes such a constitutionalism for granted. In the focus upon rules to constrain the executive arm of the State, the sense of law in Nomadic communities has slipped through arguments which the jurist might consider inclusive of the protection of such communities. This problem is nested in a legacy which has weighted down the history of European legal thought. The article initially identifies three forms of nomadism. The social phenomenon of nomadism has been the object of juristic commentary since the Greeks and Romans. The image of Nomadic peoples in such a legacy has imagined Nomadic peoples as lawless although the article argues that a sense of law has existed in such communities. Such a sense of law contradicts a State-centric international legal order. Public international law has reserved a special legal space relating to Nomadic peoples. The article identifies four arguments which might be rendered to protect Nomadic peoples in such a State-centric international community. Problems are raised with each such argument

This article claims that legal time has excluded and submerged an important sense of time inside structured time. Structured time has two forms. Each form of structured time identifies a beginning to a legal order (droit, Recht) as a whole. The one form has focussed upon a critical date. The critical date is exemplified by a basic text, such as the Constitution, or the judicially identified date of settlement, sovereignty or territorial control of a territory by the state. The second form of structured time has begun with the judicial recognition of a value such as the rule of law, the protection of minorities, equal treatment, or due process of law. With the two forms of structured time, jurists have proceeded to identify a binding law. Such a law has been considered a rule, principle, doctrine or other intelligible standard. Once structured legal time has thus begun, events of legal relevance have been represented by jurists in a distinct phase or period of time. Each such a distinct period is parsed through reference to its named, or labelled, starting point and the latter, in turn and ultimately, with reference to the beginning of the very constitutional order as a whole. Legal justification and the conceptual structures of justification are presumed to follow suit. The article argues, however, that another sense of time, excluded and submerged inside structured time, is experienced. An experienced event, manifested as a discrete incident in experiential time, opens to a condition of the possibility of the existence of law.

This article raises the critical issue as to why there has been assumed to be a boundary to legal knowledge. In response to such an issue I focus upon the works of Jacques Derrida who, amongst other things, was concerned with the boundary of the disciplines of Literature, Philosophy and Law. The article argues that the boundary delimits the law as if the inside of a boundary to territorial-like legal space in legal consciousness. Such a space is not possible without the boundary. Derrida’s most insightful essay in this regard is his study of Franz Kafka’s untitled parable in The Trial. The parable represents a man who waits for an invitation to enter the Law until he nears his end. Derrida responds to the parable in his essay, “Before the Law.” This article uses the parable and Derrida’s response to it as a starting-off point for a reconsideration of the boundary of legal knowledge. In this context, Derrida asks this question: “why is Kafka’s parable categorized as Literature or Law?” Such an issue depends upon the boundary of a discipline, according to Derrida. And that focus, in turn, asks whether the boundary pre-exists any text which is represented as “Literature” or “Law” or “Philosophy.” This article claims, however, that Derrida’s theory presupposes that law, as a discipline, encloses a territorial-like space in legal consciousness. Each discipline possesses such a space. So too does the state and the university. Inside this bounded space, officials of the Law are free to consciously deliberate, reflect, and render decisions about the context of the Law. Analytically and phenomenologically before the boundary is taken for granted in an academic discipline, however, there is an unbounded non-law. The aporia of Derrida’s theory of the boundary of the Law is that the official or expert knower of the official language inside the boundary cannot assume the imagined boundary of legal knowledge without implicitly claiming to know the exteriority to the boundary. And yet, officials and expert knowers cannot know such an exterior extra-legality because, by virtue of the boundary as encircling a territorial-like space, knowledge is considered legal only when it exists inside the boundary. “The Law” is the consequence of the imagination of the expert knowers of the language as well as of the non-expert who believes in the bounded territorial-like space.

Kenneth Westphal in his Hegel, Natural Law and Moral Constructivism, offers an argument to the effect that Hegel elaborated a theory of natural law. Westphal contrasts such a natural law with positivism. Such a contrast holds out an either-or prospect: either Hegel is a legal positivist or he is a natural law thinker. I ask whether it is possible that Hegel elaborated a third theory of law other than that of positivism or of natural law, In addressing this possibility, I first raise a problem in Westphal's adoption of Hegel's regressive argument. The ultimate justification, according to Westphal, is an a priori concept: namely, the equal rational will. I then exemplify the importance of the problem when a constitutional lawyer identifies intermediate principles justifiable with reference to such a final referent of justification. The problem raises the prospect that Hegel's theory of law has elements of both natural law and positivist law. Section 3 highlights the need to situate any natural law claim in the particular ethos of the movement of legal consciousness through the experience of time.

(1983). PUCARA AND TIAHUANACO TAPESTRY: TIME AND STYLE IN A SIERRA WEAVING TRADITION. Nawpa Pacha: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 1-44.

Statelessness’ is a legal status denoting lack of any nationality, a status whereby the otherwise normal link between an individual and a state is absent. The increasingly widespread problem of statelessness has profound legal, social, economic and psychological consequences but also gives rise to the paradox of an international community that claims universal standards for all natural persons while allowing its member states to allow statelessness to occur. In this powerfully argued book, Conklin critically evaluates traditional efforts to recognize and reduce statelessness. The problem, he argues, rests in the obligatory nature of law, domestic or international. By closely analysing a broad spectrum of court and tribunal judgments from many jurisdictions, Conklin explains how confusion has arisen between two discourses, the one discourse inside the other, as to the nature of the international community. One discourse, a surface discourse, describes a community in which international law justifies a state's freedom to confer, withdraw or withhold nationality. This international community incorporates state freedom over nationality matters, bringing about the de jure and effective stateless condition. The other discourse, an inner discourse, highlights a legal bond of socially experienced relationships. Such a bond, judicially referred to as ‘effective nationality’, is binding upon all states, and where such a bond exists, harm to a stateless person represents harm to the international community as a whole.