The international legal system as a system of knowledge

International lawyers disagree over the proper understanding of several fundamental issues of international law, and genuinely so. Examples include the concepts of a legal norm and legal interpretation, and the relationship between different spheres of regulation. Lawyers themselves would often seem to have only a very faint idea of what eventually provokes this disagreement, which makes further constructive debate very difficult.

This Project brings knowledge that should help to fill this void and thus improve conditions for a more productive legal discourse.

As the Project maintains, lawyers construct knowledge of international law differently. Legal knowledge presupposes some notion of a legal system. This notion is an ideal; it is the belief that some precise way of organizing single pieces of legal knowledge is desirable and worth aspiring to.

Any such notion of a legal system derives from a conception of law. This Project departs from the common tripartite categorization of international lawyers as defending either a legal positivist’s, a legal idealist’s or a legal realist’s conception of law. As argued, lawyers will construct knowledge of international law differently, depending on which one of these three conceptions of law that they take for granted.

It is the objective of the Project to establish this claim and to explore how different notions of an international legal system play out in legal practice.