This Chapter provides a panoramic account of the making of international criminal law (ICL). The complexity of international criminal lawmaking is demonstrated by the norm profusion and growing specialization within this field, accommodating multiple lawmakers, sources, and enforcement frameworks. The efficacy of legality as the constraint on (substantive) lawmaking is qualified by ICL’s conflicted character as a methodological hybrid which pays allegiance to competing doctrines of sources and interpretation. Nor does legal formalism constitute a true fetter on law-ascertainment: it does not square with the role of, and relationship between, law-creating processes and law-determining agencies in ICL. The latter is ‘autopoietic law’, to the extent it has been legislated by judges at the interstices of the traditional lawmaking authority. The polycentrism of lawmaking opens ICL, whether judge or state-produced, to legitimacy challenges, relating to the motives that led states to design some ICL regimes as more autopoietic than the others.
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your Elgar Online account
-
Front Matter
-
PART I: THEORETICAL VIEWS OF INTERNATIONAL LAWMAKING
-
PART II: INTERNATIONAL LAWMAKING IN AN INTER-STATE SETTING
-
PART III: INTERNATIONAL LAWMAKING BEYOND THE STATE
-
PART IV: INTERNATIONAL LAWMAKING IN SELECTED ISSUE AREAS
