terials (legal sources, policies, principles) and reconstructing them into present categories.11 This pragmatic, anti-conceptualist orientation is an important aspect of Scandinavian legal culture. History and dogmatics, far from being opposed, are therefore deeply interwoven. It is perhaps the view that history is a particular legal approach that can be said to have hindered lawyers from seeing or grasping this temporal aspect in legal dogmatics. Lawyers face the challenge that all legal texts from the past – case law, legislation, preparatory work, doctrinal writings – may be relevant. Koskenniemi similarly presupposes that bricolage, a term coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, is at work in the history of international legal imagination. In his history of the legal imagination as it operates in relationship to the use of power in international contexts, from 1300 until the 1800s, Koskenniemi assumes that throughout time “well situated lawyers, political actors and intellectuals employed familiar legal vocabularies lying aroundto construct responses to new problems in order to justify, stabilize or critique the uses of power.”12 In this sense, as Anne Orford have argued (in the case of international law), lawyers and equally historians of law engage in choices that are eminently political. As Orford writes: Indeed, a core aspect of legal work is persuasion.14 Law is not about discovering some “objective” truth but about persuading audiences – often those in authoritative positions – to act or think in certain ways. This means that legal reasoning does not merely apply rules but also participates in shaping what is perceived as common sense. In this 106 constructing the past: legal archives and critique there is no neutral story to be told about what something called ‘international law’ is, the context into which particular legal texts or concepts should be placed, the methods by which texts should be interpreted, whose interpretation of a text or concept is authoritative, who counts as a ‘subject’ of international law, what counts as a ‘source’ of international law, the sites in which international law is made, and thus what kinds of archives offer what kinds of ‘evidence’ about what international law really meant at any given moment or where it really originated. The answer to any of these questions is political rather than technical.13 11 Joseph William Singer, ”Legal Realism Now” California Law Review1988 465, p. 503. 12 Martti Koskenniemi, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power 1300–1870, Cambridge 2021, p. 2, emphasis added. 13 Orford, International Law and the Politics of History (above, note 7), 256. 14 For this argument, see Koskenniemi, To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth (above, note 12), p.4–5.
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