ABSTRACT
In this contribution, I will look at the way that we, international or transnational lawyers and legal academics, engage with time, and the way that engagement conditions the work that we produce. International and transnational law and lawyers have been instrumental to the historical production of what I will call transnational time. The relationship is reciprocal: while international lawyers have contributed to the production of transnational time, transnational time has contributed to the production of international lawyers. This interrelationship, however, is not founded on any transcendent truth about time or anything else. It is founded on a sort of tacit practicality: this time works in conjunction with our law. But on what basis is the relationship a practical one? When I work with and in this time and law, what am I working for? In the context of this volume, these questions ask to what ends this backstage pragmatism determines my professional performance. My provisional answer proceeds from an observation that this time works especially well for certain socio-economic purposes or programmes. Further, it not only works well with these programmes, but is also constitutive of them. Consequently, my own work practices in conformity with this time, including the technological assemblages and accelerating competitive pressures that it encompasses, serve to reproduce these programmes to which it is joined. My implication in these programmes, however, also makes clearer some of their limits, thereby making visible other programmes with greater transformative possibilities.
