Public International Law

Chapter 1 — The Nature and Work of International Law

This open-access chapter introduces public international law for students, teachers, and independent readers. It examines how international law appears in public life; how it constitutes a legal order of its own kind without centralized government; how validity, consent, and compliance shape its normativity; and how natural-law, positivist, realist, institutional, and critical approaches offer competing readings of the same problems. A worked example and a concluding reflection on law after disenchantment complete the chapter. Published freely on thetextbookproject.org, it may be read, downloaded, cited, and assigned in courses under the Creative Commons licence stated on the cover.

Chapter 2 — Sovereignty

Chapter 3 — The Making of International Law

Chapter 4 — International Legal Personality

Chapter 5 — Statehood

Chapter 6 — Jurisdiction

This open-access chapter treats jurisdiction as the legal form through which international law allocates authority: who may prescribe rules, decide disputes, enforce consequences, and speak the law. Its contribution is doctrinal and structural at once. It teaches the classic forms and grounds of state jurisdiction—prescriptive, adjudicative, and enforcement; territoriality, nationality, protective jurisdiction, effects, passive personality, and universality—while showing that these categories are never only technical. The chapter reconstructs jurisdiction’s colonial and postcolonial history, from the Doctrine of Discovery and the mandate system to indigenous title, resource control, and contemporary struggles over investment arbitration, intellectual property, public health, and digital sovereignty. It examines universal jurisdiction as both a promise of accountability and a site of selective enforcement; maps authority beyond the state in the Security Council, WTO, IMF, ISDS, climate regimes, and platform regulation; and treats conflicts of jurisdiction, forum non conveniens, applicable law, and foreign judgments as part of the same contest over legal reach. Throughout, it asks not only which connecting factor applies, but what distribution of power, capacity, and remedy that claim of authority produces. Published freely on thetextbookproject.org, it may be read, downloaded, cited, and assigned in courses under the Creative Commons licence stated on the cover.

Chapter 7 — Immunity

This open-access chapter treats immunity as the other half of jurisdiction: the rules that decide when a court, prosecutor, or enforcement authority that could act must nevertheless stop. Its angle is institutional and political as well as doctrinal. Immunity allocates power among states, domestic forums, international organizations, and claimants. It decides who may sit in judgment, who is shielded from process, who bears the loss when a foreign state trades or wrongs, and who is left without a practical remedy. The chapter maps state, diplomatic, organizational, and official immunities; the move from absolute to restrictive state immunity; decolonization and the state as trader; universal jurisdiction and international crimes; human-rights and civil-reparation claims; and the separate barriers of act of state, non-justiciability, and enforcement. Throughout, it asks not only what rule applies, but what distribution of authority and risk that rule produces. Published freely on thetextbookproject.org, it may be read, downloaded, cited, and assigned in courses under the Creative Commons licence stated on the cover.