Treaty Conflict and Political Contradiction

Book excerpt: One of the first books generated by the new and controversial movement in jurisprudence known as critical legal studies, this superbly written volume explores the problem of treaty conflict in international law: the legal consequences of inconsistent commitments by one nation to two or more others. The author uses this problem as a prism through which he focuses a number of major theoretical issues in international law and international relations. The result is a pathbreaking intellectual history of international law--one grounded in an account of the changing structure of international society and illustrated with a cogent analysis of recent events in the Middle East. Certain to stand as the definitive reference work on treaty conflict, Binder's work provides students and scholars of international relations with an illuminating survey of theories of the state and treaty in international jurisprudence.