The Routines of International Law

This essay argues that international legal discourses, including in the interpretations of international law that populate them, function as a deeply entrenched routine composed of a great variety of professional habits. This essay grapples with one of these shared habits constitutive of the routine of international lawyers, namely what international lawyers refer to as ’methods’. Methods, it is argued here, are among the most central of all the habits constitutive of the routine of international lawyers, in that methods help the routine to conceal what it does. More specifically, this essay claims that the methods deployed by international lawyers enshroud international legal discourses with both novelty and vulnerability, thereby camouflaging the tragedy and cynicism of the routine of international lawyers. The essay ends with a few remarks on what a counter-routine methodology could look like.