Do we face a new rule of lawlessness? On the high seas, in matters of international law and human rights, and even in domestic prosecutorial practices, any grounds to place one’s trust in the lawfulness of order seem increasingly elusive. The New World Order appears to be no order at all; the century of secular universalisms leaves us in the state of a general and all-encompassing nihilism. Still, rather than signaling a dead end rife with global despair, the collapse of everything that went under the name of the New World Order could be a harbinger of ample opportunities for imagining new and competing forms of legitimacy. Such would be the event of legitimacy in the eclipse of legality.

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