One of the core insights of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is that there must be ‘a sense of possibility’. This chapter analyzes debates on the law applicable to cyberwar, as debates emanating from a sense of possibility, which translates into imageries of the way cyberwar might, could, or ought to happen, i.e. how possible future realities are construed. The analysis is limited to the Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. The basic point of much legal analysis is to make sense of new phenomena in terms of pre-existing legal rules, or, to make the unfamiliar, familiar. The creation of these legal imageries is contrasted with non-legal imageries of cyberwar, as found in military and security studies. The purpose of this exercise is to carve out more clearly what is particular about the way in which international lawyers have imagined the future in this domain.
Lex Lata comes with a Date; or, What Follows from Referring to the “Tallinn Rules”