Towards an Aesthetic Epistemology of International Law

While there is a growing jurisprudence in the field of art (aesthetics) and international law, there is still space to theorise about the philosophical approach that we choose when we decide to engage the discipline as an artistic endeavour. In this article I argue that an aesthetic conception of international law can help go past the limitations imposed by rationalist accounts of legal order by thinking of it as an experience rather than a social science. This subjective shift in emphasis does not have to commit to a preordained theory of how international law is meant to look like, but rather focuses on the manner in which international lawyers engage with their discipline. I conclude by arguing that international law is not a naturally occurring phenomenon which exists in the empirical world and which we pick out by our senses – it is a human artefact constructed through our involvement with reality. This allows for many argumentative possibilities, and it is by the action of choosing these possibilities that we define the boundaries of what international law is.