The doctrine of sovereignty seemed too abstract to provide a reliable basis for conclusions about the content of international law. The more concrete it was made, the less normative it became. Similarly, the doctrine of sources was left oscillating between justice and consent based arguments without being able to fully rely on either.

It is possible to make a fresh start and imagine that both sovereignty and sources are only abstract – theoretical – ways to grasp the concrete character of international relations. We might assume that international law is “living” law, constantly shaped by inter-State conduct and normative beliefs which cannot be adequately grasped by abstract, conceptual exercises around “sovereignty” or a formal sources doctrine. What might seem needed to know the norms is, rather, to take a closer look at State practice and State beliefs. Moreover, once that perspective is taken, we might hope to reconstruct the two preceding doctrines so as to avoid the problems encountered in discussing them independently of State practice and beliefs.

For it seems clear that the three doctrines do not have any independence from each other. Once we have clear what the customary practice and normative beliefs held by States are, we seem to have exhaustively defined the normative scope of “sovereignty” and need no formal sources doctrine at all. At best, these would then be simply descriptions of the norms we have “found” and the ways in which we have found them.