4.1 Layer 1: Logic and evidence

The first layer is logic and evidence. Unremarkably, thinking about international law can change through logical thinking and the discovery or understanding of new evidence. This itself, being straightforward, deserves no particular attention here. It bears mentioning though that logical thinking, in law, is quite unlikely to ever be pure, unaffected by the other layers of constraint and influence on international law in the minds, operating in isolation or in a vacuum. It is debatable whether pure logical thinking tout court is possible at all.Footnote ⁴⁰ It seems quite certain that thinking involving language, such as legal thinking, cannot.Footnote ⁴¹ When it is said that words, such as legal terms, have an ‘objective meaning’ or a ‘logical meaning’, these adjectives are taken in a different sense than in the philosophical distinction between objective and subjective or in the field of formal logic, because meaning of words, and any other signs, are based on a ‘silent agreement between participants in a conversation’, as Gadamer would put it,Footnote ⁴² and that silent agreement is based on many other elements, some of which would feature on the layers discussed hereafter. None of this of course means that logical relations between thoughts does not constrain or influence the thinking of international law; the point is simply to clarify that it does not operate in isolation or vacuum from the other elements on the other layers.

4.2 Layer 2: Emotions and consciousness

The second layer is emotions and consciousness. A ‘direct’, immediate, and purely objective understanding of the world is never possible.Footnote ⁴³ Access to the world, to evidence, the processing of information and ideas – this is always, inevitably, mediated and influenced by emotions and various psychological drivers, as well as different things that make up consciousness. As a review from a leading research group in affective science put it laconically: ‘Reason and emotion have long been considered opposing forces. However, recent psychological and neuroscientific research has revealed that emotion and cognition are closely intertwined … emotional responses modulate and guide cognition … Emotion determines how we perceive our world.’Footnote ⁴⁴

The same mediated access to the world applies to legal thinking. Emotions and consciousness influence the practice of (legal) logic and the identification and appreciation of evidence in legal thinking. Legal thinking is inevitably emotional thinking; it is more broadly psychology- and consciousness-influenced thinking.

There are interesting encounters between international law and emotions in the literature. For instance, Andrea Bianchi and Anne Saab showed how fear influences international law-making (rule-making, decision-making, and other forms of international legal change).Footnote ⁴⁵ Anne Saab has discussed how fear more specifically is used by and shapes climate change discourses. ^{Footnote 46} Emily Kidd White has done work on the role of emotions in structuring the object of international law, separate from the subject studying it: she argues that rational, classical approaches to international law put the focus on contingency, treaties, ownership, and jurisdiction, while an approach grounded in emotions would see bodies, precarity, relations, desires.Footnote ⁴⁷

The approach taken here puts the focus somewhat elsewhere: on the subject studying international law and what emotions likely traverse him. Not the emotional objects she studies, like precarity or terror, but the emotions of the subject himself.Footnote ⁴⁸ This would cover, for instance, the question of why emotionally we do the ideational construction of international law that we do, and what emotions influence our epistemologies and thus the manufacture of our scholarship. ^{Footnote 49}

This brings up Martha Nussbaum’s work, when she writes that emotions must:

Nussbaum focuses ostensibly on ethics, on emotions as judgment, while I focus on legal epistemology, but epistemology can also be understood as a form of judgment: the knowledge act, the decision to know, can be seen as judgment.Footnote ⁵¹

On consciousness, Raymond Williams’ ‘structures of feelings’ come to mind. ‘[T]he endless comparison that must occur in the process of consciousness between the articulated and the lived’,Footnote ⁵² he explains, tends to reveal a tension, a ‘tension between the received interpretation and practical experience’.Footnote ⁵³ This tension is ‘often an unease, a stress, a displacement, a latency’Footnote ⁵⁴ between what is and can be articulated and what is felt and experienced: these semantic inconsistencies point to structures in thinking, structures which cannot be reduced to currently existing, precipitated social semantic formations. These structures remain structures of…feelings, rather than thought, because they are not yet articulated. They are rather ways of thinking which vie to emerge, though already influence the articulated thinking.Footnote ⁵⁵ This speaks to the distinction between access-conscious mental states (which is representational) and phenomenal consciousness (subjective experiences which overflow cognitive access).Footnote ⁵⁶

4.3 Layer 3: Market opportunities for ideas

The third layer, more pragmatic, comprises market opportunities for ideas. This will be the focus of the balance of this article after this section.

An idea (perhaps one reached through logical thinking based on new evidence and mediated by emotions and phenomenal consciousness) will flourish, spread, become influential, and change the thinking in a field if it is ‘received’ in the field. ^{Footnote 57}

One might think of an idea being ‘received’ in a field by analogy with the meaning of a text being received by an audience. An interesting take on the matter is Hans Robert Jauss’s ‘reception theory’ in literary theory, itself inspired by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics.

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s core argument about hermeneutics, as already alluded to above, was that interpretive acts are always contextualized, the meaning given to texts depending on social, historical, and other contexts, on what questions the interpreter asks of the text. ^{Footnote 58} Hans Robert Jauss took the idea further and developed a ‘reception theory’, which puts more accent on the acceptance of meaning and on the historical evolution of the meaning given to a particular text, ^{Footnote 59} the classical example being how foundational religious texts were understood differently over the centuries. ^{Footnote 60} In economic terms, to stay in the idiom of market opportunities, one might say that the questions the interpreter asks of the text (Gadamer) and the willingness to accept certain meanings given to a text through history (Jauss) are ‘demands’ (as in ‘supply and demand’) on the market for meanings. The same way of thinking can be extended, not to meanings given to texts, but to ideas.

In that sense, an idea likely will be received in a field if it resolves a question which was asked of the thinking, and for which there is willingness of acceptance. An idea for which there is a demand.

What factors determine the demand is a complex matter. One can roughly distinguish two types of factors: general, exogeneous ones, which would tend to be present much beyond the field of international law, and somewhat more specific, endogenous ones which are less connected to the world beyond international law. The difference between the two is a matter of degree. This article will seek to unpack some of the core endogenous factors determining the demand for certain ideas in international law. But before we turn to this, let me rapidly mention two exogenous factors.

The first exogenous factor is aesthetics. Aesthetics in the sense of beauty, not in the sense of the underlying principles of a person’s work.Footnote ⁶¹ Beauty attracts. As an end in itself that gives satisfaction, Kant would say.Footnote ⁶² As a means to the end of biological survival and evolution, naturalistic psychology would suggest.Footnote ⁶³ More generally as a ‘force in awareness, creativity, and survival’, medical scientists would argue.Footnote ⁶⁴ But let us leave aside the question of why exactly beauty attracts. The fact that it does attract, Ariel Conomos recently showed, also applies to beautiful ideas, beautiful ways to resolve problems, beautiful theories: scientists, academics, lawyers, mostly everyone has a preference for beautiful ideas.Footnote ⁶⁵ Intellectual performance is judged in part as an artistic performance. There is such a thing as an aesthetic of knowledge, beautiful knowledge. Simple theories, uncomplicated solutions to problems tend for instance to be considered aesthetically pleasing. The beauty of an idea, of a theory, determines its worth on the market for ideas. There is a demand for them. It would be interesting, but beyond the scope of this article, to examine how criteria of beauty have evolved for ideas and thoughts in the general scientific domain, and how that evolution has been matched in international law.

The second exogenous factor is captured by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s theory of justification.Footnote ⁶⁶ An idea may be received in a field, it was argued above, if it resolves a question which was asked of the thinking. That resolution must be accepted. The solution it offers to a conundrum, for instance, must be accepted. Most questions can be interpreted, at some juncture in the reasoning about them, as a dispute; a dispute between solutions. (Recall the point above about knowledge as judgment.) For the solution to a dispute to be accepted, it needs to be justified, Boltanski and Thévenot would in essence say. And that justification, the point where ‘because…’-type regressions stop, depend on what they call ‘principles of judgment’ or ‘orders of worth’. Principles of judgment for justifications also exist in intellectual networks, where they become principles justifying and validating ideas. An idea may be justified and validated, or ‘received’ in the language from above, there may be ‘demand’ for it, because it elicits amazement and awe; or because it smacks of responsibility and honesty; or because it comes from a place of visibility, popularity, or fame; or because it deals in solidarity; or because it contributes to prosperity; or because it is efficient and reliable.Footnote ⁶⁷ Such principles of judgment seem rather to traverse large swaths of the population and to be determined by culture and epoch and other social factors; they seem unlikely to be specific, endogenous to international law.

Endogenous factors, those that this article will concern itself with, which are taken to be more specific to the field of international law than the two just discussed, are taken to be: the shifting of international law paradigms; the rises and falls of schools of international legal thought; the constitution of epistemic subfields within international law: the shifts in material or ideological or other interests of the field’s important individuals; and the currents of beliefs in the field. The evolution of these five factors influences the demand for specific ideas or for kinds of ideas. This is how, ‘market opportunities for ideas … open up at particular times’, as Randall Collins puts it. ^{Footnote 68} These five factors will be discussed in Section 5.

Before we turn to the next layer of constraint and influence on international law in the minds, one particular interaction between these layers deserves mention: how market opportunities for ideas influence the emotions and other psychological drivers of the thinker. Collins recalls that ‘Thinking is a conversation with imaginary audiences’. ^{Footnote 69} During these conversations, the feeling of excitement (one of the psychological drivers of thinking, which orient the thinking, the holding on to an idea) felt when thinking a new thought depends on the expected reactions of these audiences. The feeling of excitement may be triggered by the ‘market opportunities’ that the imaginary audiences offer: ‘Eureka, I found an idea which will be bought into! Let me hold on to that.’ And the audiences react, offer market opportunities, according to the intellectual networks that traverse them, intellectual networks which spread and regroup according to paradigms, schools of thought, epistemic subfields, interests, and beliefs.

4.4 Layer 4: Organizational base

The fourth layer consists of the organizational base supplying the material resources for the thinking and thus sustaining the intellectual networks.

Some forces push, others pull. Inertia pulls, impedes change. The organizational base of a field is likely to create inertia, as Howard Becker famously showed. His point was that simple material elements can constrain and organize the social situations in which social things get made, often slowing them down. He illustrated his point with classical music: bookkeepers, accountants, lawyers, unions, elementary and secondary schools teaching rudiments of music, state and city funding, as well as the instruments and the scales – all rather unsuspected elements which come together to slow down change in the music itself.Footnote ⁷⁰ Similar material elements influence international legal thinking, often increasing inertias: universities, publishers, funding agencies.

These are the more conspicuous elements. Pierre Schlag describes more silent ones:

Quiet as they are, these are perhaps the most workaday, and thus insidiously powerful, reifications of the life of the mind (at the least the life of an academic’s mind).

Schlag goes a step further, towards yet more hushed constraints and influence. He argues that these reifications are caught up in a particular ideology and political agenda: ‘Very quietly, the liberal university has been colonized by neoliberalism.’ ^{Footnote 72} Neoliberalism in the sense of ‘the inculcation of the forms, idioms, and logic of business actors in the practices and institutions’ ^{Footnote 73} – the practices and institutions of, in this case, the universities, publishers, and funding agencies. That law faculties in particular, where much of the thinking of international law occurs, have been colonized by the weltanschauung and reflexes of business actors seems obvious enough. (The use of ‘market opportunities’ for ideas in this very article is not exactly a counterexample.) This link to neoliberalism takes us to the fifth layer on the chart.

4.5 Layer 5: Wider political and economic forces

The fifth and last layer is composed of the wider political and economic forces which feed the organizational base and often influence the thinker directly. This would be the level of Pierre Bourdieu, for whom professions, certainly including the profession of thinking international law, are ‘the social product of a historical work of construction’, ^{Footnote 74} which is both based on and creates ‘social structures and mental structures’. ^{Footnote 75} This would also be, broadly, the level of Antonio Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, in the sense of the intellectual and moral leadership embedding a ruling class across society.Footnote ⁷⁶ And of Michel Foucault’s épistémè, in the sense of the subjective parameters of an epoch which define the conditions of possibility of all knowledgeFootnote ⁷⁷ – something like a paradigm in Kuhn’s sense, discussed below, but much broader, across all of society. And of Ruth Benedict’s ‘patterns of culture’,Footnote ⁷⁸ of Erich Fromm’s notion of ‘social character’,Footnote ⁷⁹ and all manner of spirits of the ages.

Closer to international law, Geoff Gordon has shown how economic materialism, the bourgeois enterprise, and vested economic interests influence the overall thinking in that field, the thinking of that object, including how they institute a certain understanding of time for international law which helps maintain these wider political and economic forces. ^{Footnote 80}

5.1 Paradigm shifts: The pull of explanatory power

Market opportunities open up for certain ideas when the right paradigms, in Thomas Kuhn’s sense, come to rule the field.Footnote ⁸¹ Paradigm shifts – when a new central understanding or set of understandings replace older ones because they have greater analytical purchase – create key windows of opportunity for new ideas to come on the market.

Kuhnian paradigm shifts are common knowledge, but a brief reminder seems in order. According to Thomas Kuhn, scientific disciplines alternate between periods of normal science and periods of scientific revolution. ^{Footnote 82} During periods of normal science, a scientific discipline, an academic field, a field of thought more generally (international law for instance) is organized around a central paradigm, a central idea or understanding, a central set of beliefs and values, which amount to rules of ‘valid truth’, widely shared by the members of the field. And then trouble comes to town. Anomalies appear. Situations in which things happen that should not happen according to the theory, are not explained by the paradigm. Typically, these situations are progressively encountered ever more frequently. The validity of the paradigm is questioned and new candidate theories (candidates for paradigm) line up in the competition to become the next paradigm. When the competition starts, the scientific discipline in question has entered a period of scientific revolution. The paradigm resists for a time by stretching its explanatory reach in increasingly less credible manners. Until it eventually gives way to a new paradigm with greater explanatory power. The new paradigm determines in turn what is valid or ‘true’ in the field, thus what thoughts can be received, thus what opportunities exist for such thoughts on the market for ideas.

Consider the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples. In the past, a dominant paradigm in the field was the principle of state sovereignty, giving states almost complete control over their territories and populations, ignoring the rights and interests of indigenous peoples. But then, with the growing need to address historical injustices, the paradigm shifted to recognize rights to self-determination, cultural integrity, and land and resource ownership. ^{Footnote 83}

Or consider the idea that law is necessarily created by states, that international law must be made by states in order to validly count as international law – an idea increasingly doubted in the field. ^{Footnote 84} Books and other publications assuming the existence of non-state international law were much more difficult to get accepted 30 years ago than they are now: market opportunities – here in the proper economic sense of a market for the sale of certain books – appeared thanks to a paradigm shift. ^{Footnote 85}

What we have here is a path of ideational change of international law which follows the path of change of paradigms: one which turns rather rarely but then quite abruptly.

That path of ideational change operates like a stock-type causal link, in stock-and-flow system dynamics analysis. Flow-type causal links are things like turning up the heating in an apartment. You open the valves a bit, it gets warmer, more or less immediately. By contrast, stock-type causal links are situations like friendship. A friend pulls one over you, nothing changes in the friendship – you forgive, no one is perfect, a friendship is not a tit-for-tat relationship. The friend pulls another one over you, still no change, no effect on the friendship. And then, the tenth time, the friendship is over, seemingly all of a sudden. The stock (here of disappointment, hurt, anger) reached a certain level, and then the effects took place. A stock-type causal link is non-linear: a stock of something needs to breach a critical threshold to cause change. ^{Footnote 86} And so with principles governing the validity (or reasonableness) of ideas and marketing opportunities for ideas: a paradigm, governing the validity or reasonableness of ideas, is falsified, or otherwise shown to be lacking in explanatory power, and nothing seems to change. But at some stage, the stock of falsifications is high enough to have an effect, and then the paradigm gives way, seemingly all of a sudden. And market opportunities open up, quite abruptly, for new kinds of ideas. The problem with stock-type causal links is that it is often difficult to assess precisely how high the stock is at any point in time, and thus how much more will make it breach the critical threshold. In other words, it is often difficult to assess precisely when a paradigm will shift, thus when that path of ideational change of international law will take a turn and have an effect. ^{Footnote 87}

5.2. Competing schools of thought: The pull of groups

Paradigms change not only because a new central idea offers better explanatory power. New paradigms can also be imposed by brute force, through the power of a school of thought.

Kuhn’s theory as described above is a widespread account of the way paradigms change, but it is simplistic and idealistic. It shows an unrealistic belief in the purity of the pursuit of scientific knowledge. ^{Footnote 88} Thinking heads are attached to the bodies of social animals, which form societies, communities, and groups, sometimes around shared ideas. Shared ideas are often reinforced within the group, which turns group membership into an epistemological obstacle because of deep-set social anxieties of exclusion. ^{Footnote 89} Consider flat-earthers (individuals who say the earth is flat): many argue that they have found group membership, and friends, when they embraced that view, and fear that bringing their thinking back to evidence from physics will lead to exclusion. ^{Footnote 90} Truth is easily traded for companionship.

Kuhn himself was used, against his intentions, as an icon of some of the radical student movements of the 1960s in the USA and in Germany. The idea that there can be revolutions in scientific knowledge was used as an argument to drive actual revolutions against the institutions producing scientific knowledge: the universities. ^{Footnote 91} Protests, arsons, and other demonstrations of force were used to bring about change in the production of scientific knowledge and thus in scientific knowledge itself: change the people manning the universities, change the relative strength of schools of thought, change scientific knowledge and thus received wisdom (or ‘truth’ in the layperson’s sense). ^{Footnote 92} Bourdieu would later write: ‘I have attributed to Kuhn the essential part of my own representation of the logic of the [scientific] field and its dynamic’; ^{Footnote 93} that is, a logic characterized by a focus on clashes of social forces in the production of knowledge, which made Bourdieu ‘one of the great heirs of the Western Marxist tradition’. ^{Footnote 94} Kuhn’s emphasis on the idea that scientific knowledge is not an immutable objective truth, but rather a matter of changing perspectives, facilitated the understanding of that knowledge as the contingent result of social forces. This famously later played tricks on Bruno Latour, when he first sought to demonstrate how scientific facts are socially constructed, ^{Footnote 95} only to find his argument soon distorted to mean that scientific knowledge is a social opinion like any other ^{Footnote 96} (in an obvious reduction of the sliding scale of truthlikeness ^{Footnote 97} to a binary opposition truth vs. opinion).

In short, new theories taking hold, being received on the market for ideas, are not necessarily always ‘scientifically’ better than the older ones they are replacing. Science does not inexorably progress, because of human nature and the diversity of things that people really try to achieve when they put forward or receive theories. Paradigms can also be imposed like one imposes a new political regime. A paradigm is ‘better’ than another, prevails over it, because the school of thought built around it is stronger than the other paradigm’s school, and can thus impose it. ^{Footnote 98}

Imposition of a paradigm can take the form of an inundation of a field with publications by the school of thought’s gang mates, relentless organization of conferences around the paradigm, the launching of an academic journal taking a fitting approach, the impartation through teaching of the exclusive correctness of a particular way of thinking (with corresponding grades to follow), intra-law-faculty politics, funding of PhD students and postdocs and appointments of professors, etc.

And so schools of thought ebb and flow, each with its paradigms, prefigurations, and underlying principles of work. ^{Footnote 99} Consider the comings and goings of formalism, constitutionalism, Marxism, the New Haven school, IR theory, the crits, the realists, the empiricists, the Helsinki school, feminist approaches, TWAIL, legal pluralism, social idealism, law and economics, law and literature, scientometrics, the grid thinkers, the reformists in their energy aesthetic, the perspectivists, the dissociativists, etc. ^{Footnote 100} These vicissitudes increase or decrease market opportunities for ideas which fit one or the other school.

5.3. The formation of distinct epistemic subfields: The pull of specialisms

Schools of thought do not only vie for domination of a field, one to rule them all. They can also break it up into smaller subfields.

Jan Klabbers famously lamented this. Each ‘corner’ of international law, he argued, has its own ‘canons of thought…intellectual leaders and hierarchies…publication venues…institutions’. ^{Footnote 101} This is bad, he found: ‘[t]he discipline has fragmented into different epistemic communities…also deeply divided along methodological lines. Instead of the fragmentation of international law being a concern, we should be worried about the fragmentation of international lawyers’. ^{Footnote 102} Andrea Bianchi, by contrast, takes joy in it. His book International Law Theories: An Inquiry Into Different Ways of Thinking smacks of the freedom that has come to breathe on international legal scholarship. ^{Footnote 103} The Berlin wall of formalist orthodoxy has finally fallen, he seems to say. Jean d’Aspremont takes a view somewhere in the middle. He sees it as a ‘growing cacophony’, causing ‘international legal scholars [to] often talk past each other’. It is not quite a worry, but it is bewildering nonetheless, he contends: ‘It is as if international legal scholarship had turned into a cluster of different scholarly communities, each of them using different criteria for the ascertainment of international legal rules.’ ^{Footnote 104}

The creation of subfields is an ideational path of change of international law. If international law means different things to different people grouped in subfields, it is a different thing in each of the subfields. D’Aspremont’s quote recognizes as much: ‘different scholarly communities…using different criteria for the ascertainment of international legal rules’. ^{Footnote 105} Legal realism has been making this point for 120 years; ^{Footnote 106} here it is extended to a subfield of international law, taken to be coherent within. It is a path of change because when an epistemic field breaks up into new subfields, new noetic constructions of the object are likely to emerge. When new subfields emerge using new criteria for the ascertainment of international legal rules, for example, new international law is made: a new noetic unity is created with a somewhat new shape. For a parallel, consider how cryptocurrencies became money. A subfield of finance developed new criteria for the ascertainment of monetary characteristics, and new money was created.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ A new noetic construction of money had emerged, specific to subfield (it later spread). The emergence of a new subfield of international law, a new distinct community of individuals who think about international law in a distinct way and according to a different paradigm with a different epistemology and working with a different aesthetic – that may well mean the emergence of a new set of norms (or other elements) deemed to amount to norms (or other elements) of international law.

5.4. The evolution of interests: The pull of capitals

What is good for a person is an incentive for that person to see certain things in a certain way, through selective attention, or at least to retain certain accounts of these things. One’s interests determine one’s epistemology.

More precisely, one’s epistemological views are credibly determined not only by one’s epistemic reasons (reasons to believe something to be true)Footnote ¹⁰⁸ but also by one’s prudential reasons-for-action (reasons to undertake a certain course of action, including holding on to a view, because it is in the person’s interest).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Applied to the current object of study, international law may be created and shaped in a certain way because of a belief that the construct is sound or ‘true’ (epistemic reasons) orFootnote ¹¹⁰ because it advances the interests of those who think it into being in that particular way (reasons-for-action).

Consider the case of a current or former government lawyer who has interests in promoting or sustaining the power of government – interests which can be psychological, such as making sense of one’s life; or social, such as belonging to the group of co-workers at large; or financial, such as staying on good terms for advisory work and other appointments. These interests, the pursuit of these capitals,Footnote ¹¹¹ become prudential reasons-for-action for an epistemology that prevents the recognition of non-state actors as creators of customary international law, for instance.Footnote ¹¹² If one’s interest is that governments stay strong, one’s epistemology is plausibly such that only governments can make law, that only states can create and change norms of international law. And so it would be unwise, and empirically unlikely, for states to elect to the International Law Commission, for work on the identification of customary international law, someone who does not have a state-centric epistemology, which in turn can partly be determined by an individual’s utility function.

These interests are not immutable. When those of the individuals who dominantly shape the thinking about international law change, their epistemology is likely to change, and international legal change is likely to be affected. The identification of such change in interests in the relevant individuals is one predictor for international legal change. For instance, academic salaries in certain countries are such that international legal thinkers are led to embrace a certain epistemology, state centric and business friendly. A change in academic salaries may cause a change in that epistemology and thus in international law. The notion of market opportunities for ideas is taken here to its most material conclusion: who can ideas be sold to, literally.Footnote ¹¹³

5.5 Changes of beliefs: The pull of ideologies

International lawyers are not immune to ideologies. There are not many market opportunities for ideas which go against deeply held beliefs. Beliefs constrain epistemologies, including in international law.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Consider the belief that law is good, an unconditional moral-political positive, always better than the alternative. ‘Wherever law ends, tyranny begins’, John Locke said. ^{Footnote 115} Or as Jerold Auerbach would put it, law is the ‘glorious triumph…over inferior forms of communitarian extra-legal tyranny’. ^{Footnote 116} (As if no tyrant had ever used a legal system to strengthen their grip on power.Footnote ¹¹⁷ ) There exists a strong belief that international law is good, that more international law is better than less, that international law has the solutions within itself.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This creates a powerful ideology, because it gives moral meaning to the profession. This easily leads to the belief that law has to actually be appliedFootnote ¹¹⁹ and obeyed, that it comes with deference entitlement, ^{Footnote 120} and that it has to be enforced if not complied with. To preserve or increase the authority of international law, to fuel its entitlement to be deferred to: these are common cardinal points on the moral compass of international legal scholars. To the point that even just questioning it creates risks of being pushed out of the community of international lawyers and into that of legal philosophers.

Or consider the belief that states are good. Léon Duguit and Hans Kelsen admitted that:

This contributes to the axiom, and the difficulty in changing the axiom, that only states can make international law: It closes market opportunities for related ideas, and thus partakes in the collective construction of the noetic unity.