[Jean d’Aspremont is Associate Professor of International Law, Amsterdam Centre for International Law (ACIL), University of Amsterdam and Editor-in-chief of the Leiden Journal of International Law]
This post is part of the Leiden Journal of International Law Vol 25-3 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below.
Debate has always been a central medium of thought-making and, hence, knowledge-production in social sciences. This is why, albeit aware of the pitfalls of such platforms (
see my EJIL:Talk! post), I initiated, with the help of Dov Jacobs, a partnership between the
Leiden Journal of International Law and
Opinio Juris. It is the very same rationale that propelled the observations on the wording techniques in international law that are under discussion today. Nourishing – predominantly self-reflective – debates was indeed the avowed goal of this piece to which Francesco Messineo and Michael Kearney reacted, thereby further contributing to the deliberative agenda behind it. I am thus extremely grateful to them for taking some of their very precious summer time (probably the moment of the year the most conducive to reading and thinking). I am similarly very appreciative of the fact that both authors took pains to venture into (and play with) some of the wording techniques described in this editorial, doing so with great mastery and uncontested brio.
Although deeply thankful for their effort, I bemoan the extent to which Francesco and Michael, under the – conventionally necessary – veil of disagreement, fundamentally concur with the core ideas defended in the paper. Indeed, there neither of them seem to completely deny the competitive dynamics at play in the epistemic community of international law as well as the cosmetic, eye-catching, erudition-magnifying techniques which are deployed by the members of that community in their attempts to ensure that the information they produced is received and validated as proper knowledge by their peers. This being said, the readers of this blog ought not be anxious. Voicing disagreement is congenital to expert blogging and there is amble material to bicker about. Allow me to – completely arbitrarily and out of personal convenience – pick those points I deem the most fundamental and which I – very selfishly – would enjoy elaborating on (after all, legal blogging is a structurally and emotionally selfish exercise).
