Focus: Interpretation and Custom

• Klabbers, Jan

Abstract

This brief article, partly a comment on the articles by Danae Azaria, Kristina Daugirdas and Orfeas Chasapis Tassinis elsewhere in this issue, suggests that when it comes to discussing the sources of international law international legal scholarship would do well to be sensitive to issues related to democracy, representativeness, accountability and other staples of political theory. No matter how brilliant doctrinal sources scholarship may be in its own right, sources doctrine, in particular, is never politically innocent. Such scholarship is both about taming politics and facilitating politics, and this realization, in turn, engages the judgment to realize which to apply when.