T.M.C. Asser and Public and Private International Law: The Life and Legacy of ‘a Practical Legal Statesman’ -- Legal Aspects of the Transfer of Authority in UN Peace Operations -- After ‘Iraq’: Back to the International Rule of Law? An Introduction to the NYIL 2011 Agora -- Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Providing Legal Advice on Military Action against Iraq -- Whose international order? Which law? Forging International Order: Inquiring the Dutch Support of the Iraq Invasion -- ‘Public’ International Law? Democracy and Discourses of Legal Reality -- Does Might Still Make Right? International Relations Theory and the Use of International Law Regarding the 2003 Iraq War -- Libya and Lessons from Iraq: International Law and the Use of Force by the United Kingdom.

The Netherlands Yearbook of International Law (NYIL) was first published in 1970. It offers a forum for the publication of scholarly articles of a more general nature in the area of public international law including the law of the European Union.   The main scholarly articles of this volume of the NYIL deal with the life and legacy of T.M.C. Asser and the legal aspects of the transfer of authority in UN Peace Operations. The Agora in this volume raises the fundamental question: what does the 2003 Iraq intervention teach us about the relation between international law and politics? The contributions to this section address this question from different angles, including the perspective of international relations, international legal theory, positive international law, discourse analysis, as well as the views of an international legal advisor. The contributions depict a rich and complex image of the relationship between international law and politics: beyond the relative indeterminacy of the law and beyond the collapsed boundary between international law and politics, it appears as if an international rule of law re-emerges as a specific way of doing politics.