Book Review: Jean D’Aspremont, International Law as a Belief System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his latest monograph, Jean d’Aspremont argues that the way in which international lawyers think about and practice international law can be perceived as a belief system. This system is based on certain fundamental doctrines, such as sources, responsibility, statehood, interpretation, jus cogens. These doctrines comprise rules and rest on an imagined genealogy. The belief system also relies on self-referentiality to justify its different components, and creates an experienced sense of constraint among international lawyers. d’Aspremont focuses on the discourses in the field of international law to expose their structure and reveal the often fictive connections they entertain with the historical developments that gave birth to them. Despite the complexity of presenting overlapping notions, d’Aspremont offers convincing and well supported claims. Understanding his arguments, however, often requires familiarity with the theoretical debates surrounding certain notions and instruments. Most importantly, previous exposure to the practice of international legal argumentation is necessary to make sense of the author’s assertions. The author does not advocate for radical reform of the way we practice international law; rather, he invites us to suspend our entanglement in this set of beliefs as a reflective exercise. The readers will have to decide for themselves whether this leads them to reform or entrench current international law paradigms. They can, however, seize the analytical tools proposed by d’Aspremont to better understand their own practice, improve the effectiveness of their own practice, and teach the art to the next generation of international lawyers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.034 | 0.021 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".