Law is constantly caught between stasis and dynamism, between the production of legal certainty and the adaptation to a changing environment. The tension between both is particularly acute in international law, given the absence of legislative mechanisms on the international level and the high doctrinal thresholds for change through treaties or customary law. Despite this apparent tendency towards stasis, international law is changing frequently and rapidly in many areas, though in ways that are not well understood. This article seeks to begin an inquiry into these ways of change, starting from two vignettes of recent change processes and presenting a number of conjectures about core elements of a conceptualization of change in international law. The resulting picture reflects significant variation across different areas of international law, multiple paths of change outside traditional categories, and states in different—and not always central—roles. Much change observed in contemporary international law travels on paths and is advanced by authorities created by social actors and their practices relatively independently from doctrinal representations. This presents a challenge for doctrinal categories, and it should provoke a broader, empirical reconstruction of the social life of international law today—a far more dynamic but also less orderly life than typically assumed.

中文翻译：

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国际法动态

法律经常在停滞与活力之间，在法律确定性的产生与对不断变化的环境的适应之间徘徊。鉴于国际层面缺乏立法机制以及通过条约或习惯法进行变革的理论门槛很高，因此两者之间的紧张关系在国际法中尤为严重。尽管存在这种明显的停滞趋势，但国际法在许多领域正在频繁而迅速地发生变化，尽管其方式尚不为人所知。本文试图开始对这些变化方式的调查，从最近变化过程的两个小插曲开始，并提出一些关于国际法变化概念化核心要素的猜想。由此产生的图景反映了国际法不同领域的显着差异，传统类别之外的多种变化路径，以及处于不同（但并不总是）角色的国家。在当代国际法中观察到的许多变化都是由社会行为者创建的权威机构及其实践相对独立于教义表述而推进的。这对理论范畴提出了挑战，它应该引发对当今国际法社会生活的更广泛的、经验性的重建——一种比通常假设的更有活力但也不那么有序的生活。