Networking Customary Law

The established mechanisms of international law formation have stalled. A primary cause of this legal sluggishness is the perceived illegitimacy of customary international law. The design of CIL, emergent from the civil law tradition, was intended to enable a dynamic body of legal norms untethered to text. Over time, both perceived and real infirmities within the system’s understanding of customary law have left customary law as a source of last resort.“Networked custom” offers an alternative understanding of CIL formation to reinvigorate the intended dynamism of CIL by tracking it to distillations of society’s diverse and dispersed. While not embracing particular methodologies, the Article also explains the necessary characteristics and limiting principles in capturing networked intelligence. Ultimately, with a theoretical framework in place, this piece explains how applying networked custom can repair CIL’s legitimacy, restore its dynamism, and positively influence the unfolding expansion of international legal personality.