This is a compendium of innovative interpretations of the objects of international law. These analyses are edited by leading international law scholars Jessie Hohmann and Daniel Joyce. Their joint “Introduction” considers a journey, beginning with the object itself, then unusually, deconstructing that object's legitimacy, and focusing on its ability to directly communicate with us. The volume aims to extend the discipline's critical and theoretical boundaries beyond the usual preoccupations of states’ intentions, norms, and regulatory regimes. They refer to international law's remoteness, despite the hope by its varied practitioners that international law can create social change, and consider that this project's uniqueness is a repositioning of focus from text-based study to acquiring an understanding of the role of international law in remaking the physical world.

The first section, “Thinking International Law Through Objects”, provides five longer essays setting out possible frameworks to view the objects. Joyce presents the themes of collecting, collating, organizing, archiving, and displaying, literally in a cabinet, which is both esoteric and encyclopaedic. Hohmann draws us to the tactile reaction as one, inter alia, touches, moulds, creates, exploits, holds, and wears these objects, offering novel analyses, metaphors, categorizations, and connections between law and social sciences such as anthropology and history, and drawing the tangible connection of international law to day-to day life. Fleur Johns invokes play and pleasure in interacting with international law and wonders about international law's persistence. Wouter Werner compares the objects to theatre props within a stage play which can constitute, transform, replace, or symbolize other subject matter. For example, he refers to Giuseppe Bianco and Filippo Fontanelli discussing the Barcelona Traction, Light, and Power Company share certificates which are not mere share certificates, but are linked to diplomatic protection and the birth of the erga omnes obligations. Werner notes his visceral reaction in physically encountering these certificates. Isobel Roele suggests that international lawyers are given an opportunity to play when these objects perhaps manifest a bridge between fantasy and reality.

The second section, rather than categorizing the forty objects (which are idiosyncratic to each author), presents them neutrally in alphabetical order. The objects include those more usually connected to international law such as a map (but even this map, as revealed by Gerry Simpson, is more specifically an ordnance survey of violently significant monuments), and a flag (Russian and eerily waving after being planted by a Russian submersible, 4,300 metres down to the ocean floor; Rosemary Rayfuse notes that human beings are viewing this exact point of the North Pole for the first time), to a paper shredder. Particularly startling and often eliciting an emotional response are these chapters’ visual illustrations, such as the drawing of an obscene slave ship's ballast, photographs of the cruel chicotte (a Belgian whip used by colonizers), the controversial herbicide glyphosate, being hand sprayed, and that evocative subject of international law, a mother whale and her calf.

This intimate volume, by invoking conscious and unconscious reactions, initiates future discernments in international law.