Omri Sender. International Law-Making by the International Court of Justice and International Law Commission: Partnership for Purpose in a Decentralized Legal Order

Omri Sender's monograph is the first book-length project that analyses the law-making potential that lies in the interaction between the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Law Commission (ILC).The book cover -two ropes, identical in every aspect except colour, tied to each other in a nautical knot -hints at his argument: the law-making power of the ILC and ICJ materials cannot be found by looking only at each body's work in isolation.It is the bind between the bodies that magnifies and strengthens the ability of each to make law at the margins of states' will.The book's objective is to '[uncover and evaluate how] the Court and the Commission interact' and thus prove that 'such interplay has had a profound impact on the wider phenomenon of international law-making', and it does this effectively (at 4).This argument -that the interaction between the ILC and the ICJ creates law that binds states -challenges state-centric views of international law-making that pervade traditional sources literature.The focus on describing and praising the 'special relationship' between the ILC and the ICJ may sell the book's intervention short, however, in that it obfuscates Sender's critique of state sidelining (at 227).In its efforts to uncover processes of normative significance in international law through a social lens, the book joins the ranks of other recent books, such as Tommaso Soave's Everyday Makers of International Law 1 and Lianne Boer's International Law As We Know It. 2 Though it flirts with the methodological heterodoxy of the aforementioned works by, for instance, employing interviews with the relevant stakeholders or conducting inquiries into the personnel movements between the ILC and the ICJ, Sender's book takes a more traditional approach.He extensively goes over primary materials produced by these bodies to substantiate his claim.In other words, he is concerned to some extent with the social phenomenon that enables the law-making process between the ILC and the ICJ to take place but focuses on how that is reflected in the legal texts themselves -an