Cover’s pluralism is obviously more open-ended than the more pragmatic
policy orientation of McDougal, Lasswell, Reisman, et al., the important
points for the current generation of international law theorists are that we need
to think of international law as a global interplay of plural voices, many of
which are not associated with the state, and that we need to focus on how
norms articulated by a wide variety of communities end up having important
impact in actual practice, regardless of the degree of coercive power those
communities wield. These important conceptual legacies form the foundation
of the pluralist account of international law that is, increasingly, the core