Giving meaning to the past: historical and legal modes of thinking

Abstract

This article contributes to the Special Issue on "The Historicization of International Law and its Limits", organized by Jean d’Aspremont and Thomas Kleinlein.

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This contribution revisits the "turn to history" in international law by focusing on the debate on method between international lawyers and (legal) historians. The paper resorts to an analogy between interpreting the past and interpreting the law as giving-meaning activities to help elucidate points of juncture between these two disciplines. Against flourishing instrumentalist re-readings of the past and manipulative uses of history that both historians and international lawyers have denounced, this paper suggests a way to validate historical narratives and discern among those which contribute to the knowledge of the past and those who would not. It concludes that the "turn to history" in international law is better appreciated as a project geared towards re-assessing its own tradition, fostering self-reflection on international law as a set of doctrines and the role of international lawyers therein, i.e. what it entails to reproduce them as international lawyers.