Morris on The Concept of International Law in the Early Advisory Opinions of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ), 1922-1930 @NomosVerlag

P. Sean Morris, University of Helsinki Faculty of Law, is publishing The Concept of International Law in the Early Advisory Opinions of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ), 1922 – 1930 in The Hope of Ages is in the Process of Realization: Establishing a World Court, 1920 – 1922 (Henri Waele and Christian Tams, eds., Nomos 2024). Here is the abstract.

This chapter examines the employment of international law as a concept in the early Advisory Opinions of the PCIJ (1922–1930). After a short review of the gradual evolution of the broader idea of the law of nations in the works of Christian Wolff and Jeremy Bentham, the central argument is that, even when the PCIJ invoked international law as a term or as an interpretative mechanism, this was often in relation to either the broader international legal environment of the 1920s, or general principles of international law. The majority of the Court’s early Advisory Opinions do not display any references to scholarship, and as such rarely invoked international law as a concept. This appears to reflect an effort to align with the shifting paradigms of the day concerning the law of nations, and the ‘new’ international law of the twentieth century. The analysis suggests further that the judicial practice consisted of a ‘jurisprudential mode’ which eventually gave way to one more closely premised on ‘mutual transactions’.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.