Recent method wars in international legal scholarship turn on the problem of law in time. Rejecting historians' focus on context and their “policing of anachronism,” prominent legal scholars like Anne Orford and Martti Koskenniemi have argued that the workings of modern law are not governed by the narrow strictures of sequential chronology and that legal scholars require alternate methods that reflect law's transfer of meaning through time. Contextualism, in this reckoning, represents a misguided methodological straightjacket that stifles critique by quarantining meaning and power in discrete historical silos; the embrace of anachronism, conversely, would foster a revitalized history of international law intimately connected with the political imperatives of the present. This essay uses the debate as an opening into a fuller exploration of law in history and in time. In considering the idiosyncratic way law frames time, sequence, and duration, it explores the connection between law's transtemporal transfers and its very mode of reproduction. To speak of law's capacity to escape context and travel through time is another way of describing its normativity: the laws of the past that survive to exert a normative force in the present are not, in their law-ness, past—they are simply present law. The essay suggests some ways to make that temporality itself the object of analysis (rather than naturalizing and affirming it, as Orford has, or, conversely, dismissing it as bad history, as some historians have). It draws on the history of science to generate an account of law's temporal habitus as a disciplinary knowledge tool, a kind of epistemic virtue that is intimately involved in law's internal criteria for truth and falsity.

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3. 法律与天使时代：国际法的方法之争与纪律的有效生活

最近国际法学界的方法论战及时转向了法律问题。安妮·奥福德 (Anne Orford) 和马尔蒂·科斯肯涅米 (Martti Koskenniemi) 等着名法律学者拒绝历史学家关注背景及其“时代错误的监管”，认为现代法律的运作不受顺序年表的狭隘限制，法律学者需要替代方法来反映法律通过时间的意义转移。在这种情况下，语境主义代表了一种被误导的方法论束身衣，它通过在离散的历史孤岛中隔离意义和权力来扼杀批评；相反，接受时代错误会促进与当前政治需要密切相关的国际法历史的复兴。本文将辩论作为对历史和时间中法律进行更全面探索的开端。在考虑法律构建时间、顺序和持续时间的特殊方式时，它探讨了法律的跨时间转移与其复制模式之间的联系。谈论法律摆脱语境和穿越时间的能力是描述其规范性的另一种方式：过去的法律幸存下来以在现在发挥规范力量，在它们的法律性中并不是过去的——它们只是现在法律。这篇文章提出了一些方法来使这种时间性本身成为分析的对象（而不是像奥福德那样自然化和肯定它，或者相反，像一些历史学家那样将其视为糟糕的历史而不予理会）。它借鉴了科学史来生成对法律的解释”