Full text of the lecture published in December 2013 in the Recueil des cours, Vol. 365.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 507-525) and index.

Soft law for a hard world -- International law as custom or false conssciousness? -- Sovereignty and law -- Making law by treaty -- International law and indeterminacy -- Personality and participation -- International and national law: serving two masters? -- The impossibility of multilateralism -- Fragmentation, proliferation and "self-contained regimes" -- Universality of international law -- The rule of law and equality under the law -- Democracy and accountability -- Institutions above the law? The Security Council -- Constitutionalizing international law -- An irremediably unjust world?

The course of international law over time needs to be understood if international law is to be understood. This work aims to provide such an understanding. It is directed not at topics or subject headings sources, treaties, states, human rights and so on but at some of the key unresolved problems of the discipline. Unresolved, they call into question its status as a discipline. Is international law law properly so-called? In what respects is it systematic? Does it can it respect the rule of law? These problems can be resolved, or at least reduced, by an imaginative reading of our shared practices and our increasingly shared history, with an emphasis on process. In this sense the practice of the institutions of international law is to be understood as the law itself. They are in a dialectical relationship with the law, shaping it and being shaped by it. This is explained by reference to actual cases and examples, providing a course of international law in some standard sense as well.