The UN Security Council is the central actor in matters of peace and security, but it is notoriously affected by the global political environment. Because of the veto power, it is currently unable to address crucial peace and security issues, such as the war in Ukraine. This introduction sets out the Security Council’s role in maintaining international peace. It offers an overview of how the Council’s institutional shortcomings have been addressed in the past. The chapter identifies four defining fields of tension in which the Security Council currently operates, which are explored throughout the remaining chapters of the book. These fields comprise the tensions between: (i) law and power; (ii) centralisation and institutional diversification; (iii) universalism and regionalism; and (iv) formalisation and informalisation. The chapter concludes with a short overview of the book’s main chapters.

The war launched in February 2022 by Russia against Ukraine has become a stress test for the role of the Security Council, and it confirms some findings of the three Trialogue authors. Congyan Cai, Larissa van den Herik, and Tiyanjana Maluwa have examined the manifestations of law and power in the Council, the substance and procedure of its workings, and the relationship between the Council as the centre and its periphery in the form of regional organisations. This concluding chapter revisits the three dichotomies in the light of the Russian invasion, asking: has power eclipsed law? Are empty ritualistic procedures unable to deliver substantive outcomes? And has the centre been disabled, so that peripheral actors dominate the scene? The chapter concludes that the Security Council remains important not only as a centre of power but also as a creature of law and as a law-producer. The Council’s action and inaction are highly dependent on legal procedures (as opposed to mere ‘politics’). Finally, the Council, also in its response to the Ukrainian war, is firmly embedded within a network of other international bodies and actors.

This study’s introduction presents a new way of understanding the development of slave law in plantation America. Rather than viewing slave law as an aberration or a unique colonial development, I argue that it was a natural outgrowth of an early modern English legal system that was built around procedures, forms, categories, and concepts. English men and women did not think of “law” as a creature of substance, as we do. Rather, they encountered “law” first and foremost as a set of practices and procedures. This owed much to the early development of English common law, which coalesced around a set of formal procedures and rules administered by the King’s central courts in Westminster. Among the most important of these was the writ system, which gave litigants access to remedies in the Court of Common Pleas and the Court of King’s Bench. Because the formulae of most writs had congealed by the thirteenth century, litigants could only seek relief at common law if they could fit a complaint within a preexisting writ form. The resulting reification of form had significant legal and cultural consequences. Most importantly for our purposes, it transformed procedure into a site of innovation. Although we tend to associate procedure with rigidity, early modern litigants, advocates, and judges learned to work within English law’s extant procedural parameters in order to accomplish their particular legal goals. By deploying legal fictions and expanding older categories, they found ways to make new facts fit old forms.

Whereas the preceding chapter has taken the case file as an object immediately present in the here-and-now of ongoing practices, this chapter highlights the case file not as materially but as a temporally recalcitrant object. It traces the case file’s procedural and institutional histories, paying attention in particular to the way these histories are evoked and negotiated in court. I show how the case file becomes implicated in struggles over “what really happened”, and distinguish between two modes in which it does so: on the one hand, the legal case file acts as an innocent transporter of facts and truth; on the other, it becomes visible as an object that has actively transformed and delineated the case in question. I propose the use of the notion of the temporally folded object to understand the specific operations of legal case files, and in so doing contribute to the theorization of legal temporalities more broadly. Methodologically, then, this chapter underscores the necessity to attend to the multiple ways histories and futures become implicated in the production of legal knowledges.

This chapter explores the parallels between the critique of pure reason and the establishment of a civil condition in natural right theory. It shows how Kant’s conception of laws is ingrained in an extensive legal framework by focusing on two images, the one portraying the critique as the tribunal of reason and the other depicting the critique as the establishment of a rightful condition which is analogous to the establishment of a civil state. These images show that Kant’s account of a priori laws is not merely a colourful way of expressing a new philosophical approach; he is building an entire framework around a legal structure. In addition, the state of nature metaphor shows how the critique aims to provide a procedure for ending conflicts in metaphysics and thereby establish perpetual peace in philosophy.

The legal theory of the Scottish Enlightenment is marked by the engagement of the legal profession generally in theorizing, with a strong interest in history and law, leading on to investigations of a proto-anthropological and proto–sociological nature. This led to a move away from an emphasis on legislation to one on development of the law through the formulation of new rules through the decision of specific cases. The legal theorizing of the Scottish Enlightenment did not lead to codification projects, but favoured piecemeal incremental reform of the law through the operation of the courts in the elaboration of law in their decisions and opinions.