People disagree about international law. To help them work through these disagreements, the discipline has developed a series of rules on the interpretation of its various sources—most notably, Articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and the standards developed by the International Court of Justice and the International Law Commission for the identification of custom. The problem, however, is that these norms are themselves subject to disagreement, thereby creating a meta-debate about how to interpret the rules on interpretation. This Article delves into this meta-debate, focusing specifically on the views adopted by the “traditional approaches to international law” that is, the mainstream, the default paradigm in the minds of most international lawyers.
Nahuel Maisley