At least since the 19th century, international lawyers have defended their discipline by presenting it as a scientific enterprise. Many different strategies have been advanced in order to do so, and different scientific vocabularies articulated in conjunction with grand theories about the nature of international law. Maybe this law is objective because it can be compared to a formal science such as mathematics? Maybe it could be objective if only the profession adopted a natural science approach? Or the solution might be to turn to historical and sociological investigations? Each of these questions has been, in one way or another, addressed by the authors examined in this study. Today, however, grand theories describing what international law ‘is all about’, in which scientific aspirations were once made explicit, are considered passées. In a sophisticated field, scientific aspirations are still formulated, but with more modest ambitions. The turn to empirical interdisciplinarity in international scholarship is a representative example. Vocabularies borrowed from economics, psychology and other social sciences are now associated with international law in various scholarly projects. But the empirical turn is only the most outspoken and evident manifestation of the current resort to scientific vocabularies. Varied scientific aspirations have also been integrated into common argumentative styles. They order the way in which we argue about international legal issues. Proficiency in the discipline now means feeling when new problems, issues, or sensibilities call for international lawyers to ‘pick up’ some of these tendencies and articulate them in an original and convincing way.
