The historic American concept of freedom of the seas refers to the normative value, international law doctrine, and economic and military strategy of the United States that the oceans should be open for navigation and commerce to all nations. No single state should control or restrict the movement of ships on the high seas, in peacetime or against neutral rights in time of war. This idea has been a cornerstone of US foreign and maritime policy since the country’s founding, evolving in response to challenges over the centuries.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the Australian legal system, its structure, function and philosophical underpinnings. It explains what counts as law in Australia and who can set the rules, and it sets out the differences between legislation, common law, criminal law and civil law. It illustrates how the law is relevant to nurses and the profession, especially the concept of ‘scope of practice’. This edition of the book also raises some new concepts, such as the ‘stabilising’ and ‘disburdening’ effects of law, both of which smooth the way for people who are essentially strangers to each other to interact in everyday life.

In this chapter, we look at two different ways to categorise various elements of the law, and to fit them into one coherent whole. In the first part of the chapter, we consider sources of law, or how the law was made. Did this particular law come to us from Parliament? From the courts? From the courts interpreting Parliament? From international law?

In the second part of the chapter, we break the law down by the nature of the relationships the law is regulating, or the nature of the rights it is creating and administering: we look at public law, which regulates the relationship between the individual and the government; we look at private law, which regulates the relationship between private individuals within our society; and we look at procedural law, which regulates the way that our laws (whether public or private) are applied.

This provides our overall framework, so that as we begin to look more closely at various areas of law, you can mentally fit those areas of law into the broad, overall concept of ‘the law’.

Chapter 9 reflects on the authors’ approach to redescribing the Cold War and its relationship to international law. It challenges conventional narratives by presenting the Cold War as a subject rather than an object, exploring its multiple manifestations and impacts on global legal and political landscapes. The chapter addresses three key themes: redescription, periodisation, and aftermath. It emphasises the plurality of international laws and Cold Wars experienced worldwide, disrupting the notion of a monolithic, bipolar conflict. The authors discuss the complexities of periodisation, highlighting how different perspectives can yield varying start and end dates for the Cold War. The chapter also explores the Cold War’s legacy in the present, arguing that its influence persists in contemporary global politics and international law. It challenges the idea of a clean break in 1989, suggesting instead that many Cold War dynamics continue to shape current events and legal frameworks. Finally, the authors present their work as both a critique of conventional Cold War narratives and a retrieval project, aiming at uncovering forgotten or marginalised perspectives on international law and global politics during this period. They call for a renewed appreciation of the legal experimentation, political non-alignment, and revolutionary possibilities that emerged during the Cold War era.

Chapter 4 explores how diplomacy was practiced during the Cold War, focusing on how the period reshaped diplomacy and international law. The chapter challenges the view of the Cold War as merely a diplomatic struggle, suggesting instead that it was a struggle over the nature of diplomacy itself. It examines three key struggles: the relationship between openness and secrecy, diplomacy as performance and the concept of neutrality. The Cold War saw a return to secret diplomacy – public diplomacy was intertwined with intelligence and covert operations. In contrast, anti-colonial diplomacy emphasised openness and solidarity, using international institutions as platforms for lawful encounters. The chapter also discusses the contest over neutrality, with European international law protecting neutrality, while the Amero-Soviets disparaged it. The Non-Aligned Movement embraced active neutralism, rejecting Cold War bipolarity. The chapter highlights the diplomatic style of the Third World, which sought to assert a different international law and world order. It critiques the Western response, characterised by anti-diplomacy, relegation, and interventionism. The chapter concludes by emphasising the importance of recognising the plurality of diplomatic practices and international laws during the Cold War, and the ongoing struggle to reconfigure global politics and law after empire.

Chapter 8 explores how the atomic dimension of the Cold War reshaped global politics and international law. The Cuban Missile Crisis serves as a focal point, illustrating the juridical patterning of the Amero-Soviet Cold War and the integration of nuclear weapons into geopolitical strategies. The chapter traces the evolution of anti-nuclear movements, from initial peace initiatives to the emergence of non-proliferation policies. It examines how the threat of nuclear annihilation created a new global consciousness, transcending traditional notions of sovereignty and national interests. The development of satellite surveillance systems is highlighted as a key factor in producing new forms of ‘planetary’ knowledge, contributing to advancements in earth sciences and environmental awareness. The chapter also discusses the paradoxical split between ‘peaceful’ and ‘aggressive’ uses of nuclear technology, as exemplified by the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ultimately, the atomic dimension of the Cold War is shown to have globalised the conflict, creating a "global civil war" that eroded distinctions between combatants and civilians. This new reality challenged existing legal frameworks and fostered the emergence of new global subjects, knowledge systems, and technologies that would shape the post–Cold War world.

This chapter introduces Rival Legalities: Practices of International Law in the Cold War, exploring international law’s practices during the Cold War. The authors aim to redescribe Cold War international law, revealing a rich plurality of legal forms and practices. Contrary to the narrative of the Cold War as an interruption in international law’s development, the authors propose viewing it as a period of rivalrous yet mutually constitutive accounts of the ‘international’. This perspective highlights diverse world-making projects beyond the East-West dichotomy, including anti-colonial and anti-anti-colonial efforts. Recognising the plurality of rival world-making projects demands a different conceptual frame than one focused solely on American-Soviet rivalry. The authors argue that international law during the Cold War was not a settled body of norms but a set of practices emerging from the period’s unique conditions. By examining these practices, the book offers a new lens on the Cold War’s impact on international law, highlighting the creative and strategic uses of law by various actors, particularly from the Global South, in their struggles for decolonisation and new international legal orders.

Chapter 3 introduces the term ‘Amero-Soviet’ to describe the Cold War dynamics between the United States and the Soviet Union, framed within the UN Charter. The chapter examines the Truman Doctrine’s focus on containment and the perceived Soviet threat of subversion. It highlights the dual strategies of both superpowers, involving public commitments to international organisations and covert activities to expand influence. ‘Amero-Sovietism’ is coined to capture the collaborative yet competitive project that shaped global governance through sovereign statehood, economic development, and modernisation. This collaboration unfolded in three phases: co-imperium, co-existence and détente, each reflecting a blend of competition and cooperation, formalised through legal instruments. The chapter explores the parallelism in US and Soviet approaches to international law, with both claiming lawfulness while accusing each other of opportunism. It concludes by examining the impact of Amero-Sovietism on global order, highlighting resistance from alternative world-making projects and the enduring influence of the Cold War on international relations. This new term underscores the intertwined nature of US–Soviet relations and their joint influence on shaping the post-war world.

Chapter 5 explores the Global South’s role in shaping international law during the Cold War, challenging the dominant North Atlantic narrative. It highlights the Third World’s active engagement in creating and contesting international law through three case studies: Algeria’s war for independence, the Anglo–Iranian Oil case, and the establishment of a UN Commission on Transnational Corporations. Algeria used the Geneva Conventions to internationalise its struggle against France, redefining anti-colonial warfare as a legitimate fight for self-determination. The Anglo-Iranian Oil case at the ICJ underscored the contestation over international judicial authority, with Iran asserting its sovereignty against the UK. The UN Commission on Transnational Corporations illustrated the Third World’s alliance with the Soviet Union to challenge corporate power. These examples reveal the Cold War as a period of legal experimentation and contestation, with the Third World playing a crucial role in shaping international law and challenging retrospective assumptions about the era.

Chapter 1 reveals the largely unexamined role of geography in shaping the conceptual architecture of International Law. Although legal doctrine depends heavily on spatial categories, the discipline rarely interrogates the geographic imaginaries or cartographic histories that sustain them. This chapter excavates the deep entanglement between legal and geographic thought, tracing how Eurocentric cartography helped construct the modern state system and naturalize the “World Map” as International Law’s default visual ontology. The chapter shows how geographic thought has undergone a conceptual reckoning that International Law has yet to confront.

Despite major transformations in how authority and power are exercised today, international legal reasoning remains anchored in a static, territorial imaginary inherited from statist mapping. This disjuncture narrows the discipline’s capacity to grasp emergent forms of global ordering that operate across discontinuous, networked, and materially mediated spaces. The chapter therefore calls for renewed engagement with contemporary geographic theory, not as a doctrinal supplement but as a means of reworking the spatial premises embedded in legal thought. It frames the book as a project of grafted interdisciplinarity – cultivating new conceptual tools while reconfiguring inherited ones – and invites international lawyers to rethink how global legal space is visualized, institutionalized, and materially enacted.

Chapter 4 advances a transformative theory of territorialization by challenging the deep-rooted assumption that legal authority is spatially organized through fixed, contiguous, and mutually exclusive state territories. It argues that this assumption is not a natural fact of international legal order but the product of an inherited cartographic theory as practice. The chapter traces how this worldview emerged from early modern cartographic science and the geometric legacies of Brunelleschi, Copernicus, and Descartes, whose techniques compressed the Earth into a singular, divisible object. Over time, this image became embedded in legal doctrine.

In response, the chapter develops the concept of juriscapes. Whereas jurisdictions depict authority as a bounded, planar geometry, juriscapes capture the textured, overlapping, and trans-territorial formations through which legal rule is produced in practice. Juriscapes thus complement, rather than supplant, jurisdictions. They reveal what the geometric template of jurisdiction cannot – how legal authority thickens or thins, stretches or fractures, according to the material practices, institutional logics, and spatial continuities and discontinuities that shape territorial rule.

Reimagining territorialization through juriscapes widens the discipline’s circumference of vision, allowing international lawyers to apprehend a fuller spectrum of spatial practices that define global legal rule today.

Chapter 5 examines the Hindu polity literature, a body of early twentieth-century Indian academic works on ancient Indian political ideas, states, constitutional law, and international law. Produced largely by scholars affiliated with the University of Calcutta, these works were partly motivated by a desire to counter Western depictions of Indian constitutional history as backward and despotic. Drawing on sources such as the Arthashastra, the ancient Indian treatise on governance, the Hindu polity literature argued that ancient India had republican institutions, constitutional monarchies, and legal systems grounded in progressive principles. Indian scholars emphasized themes like social contract theory, the existence of international law, and traditions of democratic governance, often comparing these traditions favorably with Western ones. Echoing the anti-colonial Swadeshi political movement that emerged in Bengal at the same time, this scholarship reached its zenith in the 1920s. The chapter discusses the relationship of this body of literature to ideologies such as pan-Asianism and also mentions works on Islamic constitutional history that appeared in colonial India during the same period.