Editors’ Introduction to Special Issue on Legal Infrastructures

In the last few decades, international legal theory has been characterized by heated debates on how different regimes of international and regional law functionally interrelate, the nature of international law as it is applied, and how international law relates to society.These debates are foundational because they concern the essence of how we think about international law, how it is enacted and practiced, and the extent to which it fulfils its stated aims. 1 As international law has proliferated in scale and scope, its regulatory ambition has both expanded and deepened.At the same time, its different parts have also come into greater friction, prompting concerns about "fragmentation" 2 or the rise of "international regime complexity" 3 as fundamental yet potentially disconcerting traits of international law today.Within doctrinal legal scholarship, much energy has been devoted to how such normative frictions and overlaps should be functionally solved, ordered, or (re-)systematized. 4 Scholars of a more socio-legal orientation have critically explored how such dynamics can lead to politicization, as states on the one hand seek to optimize sovereign maneuverability through strategies such as forum shopping, 5 and on the other hand rights activists forge new normative linkages for strategic