Klabbers Jan, Peters Anne, Ulfstein Geir. The Constitutionalization of International Law

Oxford University Press, 2009. — 414 p. — ISBN: 978-0-19-954342-7.This book has been a long time coming. It started when, some five years ago, the present authors met at a conference in Turku, Finland, and agreed to ‘do something together’. It became readily apparent that none of us were interested in organizing a conference or series of seminars. It also became clear that none of us would be terribly keen on editing other people’s work. And so we decided we should write a book together.
The next question then was what the book should be about. Well, that was easy: we were all three of us intrigued by the constitutionalization of international law. We also settled, fairly soon, on our general approach. We were not so much interested in being merely descriptive, but instead were keen on trying to decide what shape constitutionalization could possibly take. And then the process started: we started to draft reading lists and send them around. We started to share literature tips more generally. We had a few meetings on the phone, and we met a number of times, over the years, in various places. We had a first session together in Berne, where some of the earlier drafts were first presented to a larger (but still comfortably small) audience. We met in Helsinki for a few days, just the three of us. We met in the Swiss resort of Kandersteg, where some of the drafts — more advanced by now — were presented to a high-profile audience. We met in Heidelberg, in the margins of a larger conference, and we met in Paris, again just the three of us. And sometimes it seemed like we were chatting on email, with handfuls of messages flying back and forth within a few hours.