Interview with Niels Petersen
In this episode of EJIL: Live! the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal, Professor Joseph Weiler, speaks with Professor Niels Petersen of the University of Münster, whose article, "The International Court of Justice and the Judicial Politics of Identifying Customary International Law", appears in Volume 28, Issue 2. Professor Petersen explores International Court of Justice decisions confirming the existence of customary international law. The discussion focuses on the principal empirical findings of the article, and Petersen's novel conceptualization of those arguments in terms of “judicial politics”, explicable by the institutional constraints that the Court faces. This conversation offers a reflection on how this assessment of the jurisprudence could alter scholars’ normative conceptions of the Court’s decisions, particularly in regards to customary international law.