Preface

This book is the result of several explorations that are here brought together in a substantially revised form. Thus Meditations 1 through 6 were first delivered as series of lectures at a “winter course” of international law at CEDIN in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in July of 2011. Meditations 7 and 8 were my contribution to the Summer Academy of the European Inter-University Center for Human Rights and Democratization in Venice in the summer of 2012. Meditation 6 was written under the auspices of Kyung Hee University in Seoul, where I was an “International Scholar” in the fall of 2011. The Introduction and Meditation 9 were written while teaching as Visiting Professor at the Central European University at Budapest in 2012.

From its genesis it is clear that this project could not have come to fruition without the great personal and institutional support that I enjoyed while working on this manuscript. My wife put up with me even though I was often grumpier than usual (if people who know me can believe this)! She let me focus on the book while taking care of all the burdens of dealing with workers and authorities that result from running a big house in the Tuscan hills. The European University Institute, my former university, where I taught until April 2011 and where my last seminar on international law provided the first outline of the project, provided me with access to the library during the summer of 2012 when I finished the first draft. At a very decisive point, right at the beginning, Carol Bohmer generously shared some of her research resources when I was suddenly cut off from a research library after my retirement from the Institute, and before I had a new institutional affiliation.