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All the Things That You Can Do With Jus Cogens: : A Pragmatic Approach to Legal Language

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Author

Summary, in English

Investigating the meaning of conceptual terms is an important task for international legal scholars. In the analysis of the usage of conceptual terms in international legal discourse, traditionally, most international lawyers have confined studies to the descriptive meaning of those terms. They have assumed that conceptual terms describe a relationship between, on the one hand, the particular properties identifying a particular phenomenon or state of affairs as one that belongs to the extension of a particular concept, and on the other hand, the legally relevant inferences ensuing from the categorisation. While this theory works reasonably well as long as studies are confined to the meaning of conceptual terms in law, it is ill-suited for any similar study of international legal discourse. In the search for possible alternatives, this article adopts instead a pragmatic approach to legal language. More specifically, it equates the meaning of a conceptual term with its functionality, that is, with what the uttering of a conceptual term potentially does to the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviour of participants in international legal discourse. The investigation proceeds in two steps. As Section II argues, a functionality-based theory of meaning suggests a method (referred to throughout the article as functionality analysis) that can be used for the analysis of international legal discourse. Sections III, IV and V illustrate the ramifications of functionality analysis by applying it relative to the usage of one particular conceptual term, namely jus cogens.

Publishing year

2013

Language

English

Pages

351-386

Publication/Series

German Yearbook of International Law

Volume

56

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Institut für Internationales Recht an der Universität Kiel

Topic

  • Law (excluding Law and Society)

Keywords

  • folkrätt
  • public international law
  • Conceptual Terms
  • Concepts
  • International Legal Discourse
  • Jus Cogens
  • Legal Meaning
  • Peremptory International Law
  • Pragmatics

Status

Published

Research group

  • Public International Law

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0344-3094