I approved the final proofs of my book today.
Ordering the Fragments: International Law under the Planetary Crisis comes out with Springer in the Law and Philosophy Library, volume 154.
It began as my PhD, defended in 2023, but the book is a different project now. International law is a complex beast: specialised regimes on trade, climate, human rights, and the sea have produced norms that pull against one another. For a long time the discipline has treated this as a technical problem of interpretation, more or less settled as “fragmentation”. The triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution has made plain that it is not.
So the book asks a philosophical question. How is consistency possible when the norms you reason from are inconsistent? Getting to an answer meant borrowing tools from outside the discipline. From social ontology, the question of what kind of thing a legal system is before it is a body of rules, and the idea of constitutive rules, which do not regulate conduct but bring institutional facts into being (the rules that make a piece of paper a treaty). From the cognitive turn in international law, the premise that legal argument is something lawyers perform, not a structure sitting above them waiting to be described. What the book does with these is a rational reconstruction: making explicit the logical machinery that legal actors already use implicitly, and separating facts, norms, and reasons so that each can be seen doing its own work.
Much of what changed after the PhD I owe to my colleagues at Maastricht University, particularly the Foundations of Law department and the Globalisation and Law Network, as well as to the students I taught and supervised at the Faculty of Law, who kept asking the questions I had assumed away. And, of course, to my PhD supervisors, Jaap Hage, Wagner Menezes, and Antonia Waltermann, who stayed generous long past the point where they had to be.
The book page is here: https://link.springer.com/book/9783032325945
Henrique Marcos 