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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).

Unless international lawyers get their act together and agree on the basic meaning of the key terms in their discipline, says Jean d’Aspremont, observers (and, crucially, funders) may suddenly realize that the profession is really no more than an ‘expensive debating club’ – often funded by the taxpayer – ‘in which everyone talks past each other’. Thanks also to blogs such as Opinio Juris, access to the debating chamber is no longer subject to hierarchical initiation rituals: anyone with a higher degree in (international) law is at least ostensibly welcome to join in. The ensuing competition for credibility is rife, says d’Aspremont. An ever‑increasing mass of ‘young’ and often ‘arrogant’ scholars employ words as their tools in a ‘hen house’ of ‘violent’ conflict aimed at finding new ‘names’ for things which often already have perfectly usable ones. Because of the death of Aristotelian logic and other ‘foundational’ philosophies,  the main aim of the profession has become the establishing of one’s persuasiveness and authority at the expense of the nearest colleague, often in pursuit of one’s ‘unquenchable thirst for recognition’. In order to perpetuate the illusion of a fruitful debate, the meaning of words must constantly change – there is no ‘epistemic peace’, as d’Aspremont puts it. Forget great systems of conceptual beauty collectively built by cohesive schools of thought: we want tenure, and possibly glory, too. In d’Aspremont’s view, international legal academia has become an endless game where the angst of oblivion often trumps logic and courtesy. Furthermore, this constant renaming of the institutions of international law is fashionable but pointless. As in the Leopard, everything must change constantly so that nothing actually changes. The preceding paragraph is meant to be an example of what d’Aspremont chastises. I have deliberately simplified and exaggerated his argument. I have taken his words out of context and reduced an eloquent set of arguments to what may be perceived as a rant (which his article is not). To make things worse, I have then added a perfectly unnecessary reference to a work of literary fiction which may be obscure to some of my readers, dropping it there as if everyone should know what the Leopard is (D’Aspremont would diagnose this somewhere in the spectrum between a pointless display of ‘erudition’ and a ‘strategy’ of mild ‘intimidation’). After having created this aesthetically and rhetorically pleasing straw-man, I should now proceed to mercilessly criticise his argument – a short critique is, after all, what the kind editors of LJIL and Opinio Juris asked me to write.