Lex Lata comes with a Date; or, What Follows from Referring to the “Tallinn Rules”

Abstract

At first sight, the question that Dan Efrony and Yuval Shany ask in their article, A Rule Book on the Shelf?, makes sense. If a group of lawyers writes a legal manual for state legal advisors, the logical follow-up question would indeed be, do they use it? Do these “black-letter rules,” as the Manual itself terms them, actually “provid[e] international law advice” to states operating in cyberspace? Given the Manual's own claim that its “effort [is] to examine how extant legal norms apply” to cyber warfare, one may indeed wonder whether states have used the Manual as intended—as a manual.