What is the purpose of international law?

In Legitimacy and Legality in International Law: An Interactional Account, Jutta Brunnee and Stephen Toope provide a distinctive and valuable contribution to the growing body of international law and political science research that attempts to explain the workings of contemporary international law. Legitimacy and Legality's subtle and wide-rangin arguments remind us taht jurisprudence is both a discipline and a genre. As a genre, jurisprudential writing contains a series of stylistic and thematic features that serve to distinguish it from other forms of scholarly inquiry. In this short essay, I wish to explore whether adhering to the rhetorical conventions of jurisprudence as a genre may disserve the conceptual goals of jurisprudence as a discipline. Adapted from the source document.