At a stage of life when German law students habitually prepare to finish their studies by intravenously absorbing law at commercial preparation courses, American law student Duncan Kennedy had a somewhat different notion. In a law review article he virtually pulled to pieces what he had experienced as Ivy League education at Yale Law School. In 1983, meanwhile a member of an Ivy League law school faculty, Kennedy resumed his critique in a self-published pamphlet widely known as the Little Red Book. Although being available only at the Harvard bookstore or via mail order from the author, Kennedy's statement has gained quite remarkable fame. It has been reviewed by the most esteemed law reviews, and has been quoted and widely discussed among legal scholars. Now the Little Red Book has even formally arrived in the ivory tower of legal academia: handsomely published, equipped with a fore- and afterword by the author, encompassed by thoughtful essays and, yes, gold letters engraved on the spine. The typescript of the original book however, once consciously produced in a semi-professional manner with a circulation of around 3000 copies, has been preserved. Thus readers do hold the original text in their hands, despite gold gravure.

Meetings of German-speaking Public Law assistants have, as was explained in Daniel Thym's report on the Bielefeld meeting in 2005, been a long-standing tradition. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Austrian capital has already seen four meetings of this kind, in 1970, 1981, 1994 and now in 2006. More than 150 Public Law assistants from Germany, Switzerland and (needless to say) Austria convened from 21 to 24 February in order to discuss the implications of the general topic “Law and Medicine”. In accordance with the European idea, the circle of participants was not restricted to assistants coming from those three countries but the organizers had successfully encouraged German-speaking assistants from other EU countries to make contributions. Indeed, European law, in terms of contents, also played a major role.

For some time, there has been something paradoxical about Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia (hereinafter FATU). FATU might very well have been the single most influential book of the last 15 years in the field of international legal theory. Virtually all of my colleagues have, at one point or another, engaged with it and used it to sustain their arguments in diverse areas of the law (including, amusingly enough, even in commercial arbitration). Yet, as is well known to most law library users, FATU has long been out of print, making it extremely difficult to find a copy, even more so when, as is periodically the case at my home university, the available copy goes missing. FATU, in other words, seemed to be everywhere, but nowhere to be found. The prophet had believers. His tables of the Law, however, seemed to have disappeared. The splendid republication of FATU comes as great news to all of us who have struggled to access, let alone to possess, this seminal book.

Few books have attained the influence and impact of Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia (FATU); fewer still could have made anything like such an impact with a publication run and consequent distribution as small as FATU's. Thus, as has undoubtedly been said before, and will undoubtedly be repeated subsequently, Cambridge University Press must be congratulated on their decision to publish a new edition, with a far larger print run, and wider distribution.

“International Law is what international lawyers make of it”. Thus ends the new epilogue to the second edition of Martti Koskenniemi's From Apology to Utopia (hereinafter FATU), a seminal work on international law, originally published in 1989 and now republished in 2005. Shortly thereafter, he also notes the inherent situatedness of all international legal practice, citing Outi Korhonen, which has a decisive influence on how international lawyers practice their trade, whether they are formalists, antiformalists, positivists, pragmatists or naturalists. Finally, Koskenniemi notes that the main political point of FATU is an empirical one, that the system of international law has a structural bias, wherein it favors some outcomes or distributive choices over others, especially showing a bias against the South or the Third World.

As the last straw, a question: where does it (From Apology to Utopia) lead us to, what are we to make of and with it (international law)? The author himself hints at an answer in the very last sentence of the Epilogue, which marks the difference between the original and this new edition of From Apology to Utopia (FATU), by pointing to his second Hauptwerk, the seminal Gentle Civilizer of Nations and the story about international lawyers it tells. Indeed, the last paragraph of FATU thereby becomes a sort of epi-epilogue, an interpretive afterthought on Gentle Civilizer, written after the original FATU, within the afterthought of FATU's new edition, written after Gentle Civilizer. The latter is taken to illustrate the consequences of FATU for both individual practitioner and academic lawyers, notably the continuous double bind between law and politics inherent in the structure of international law. That double bind demands, according to Koskenniemi, at once coolness and passion, that is, as he concludes, “a full mastery of the grammar and a sensitivity to the uses to which it is put.” This, of course, alludes once again to the twofold intent that inspires FATU: to disinter with archeological precision the grammatical structure of international law and to thereby enable its critique, or, as the author puts it in the Epilogue, to join a descriptive with a normative project. The double-edged argument that has resulted from this combination has uniquely captured the letter and spirit of international legal practice and has mesmerized the international legal profession ever since it first appeared in 1989. Together with Gentle Civilizer, it has justly made its author into one of the iconic figures of international legal theory of the intellectual fin-de-siècle of the outgoing twentieth and the incoming twenty-first century. Yet, for all the echoes FATU has been occasioning in virtually all corners of the legal theoretical spectrum, the consequences that flow from it for legal theory and practice have remained somewhat under-explored.