ABSTRACT
Several decades ago, Arthur Nussbaum spoke for many scholars when he declared the 19th century to be “the golden age of international law.”1 Yet
this commonplace had little enough support, as measured by the attention that Nussbaum and his peers actually gave to doctrinal developments in this golden age. Nussbaum, for example, devoted five times more space to doctrinal developments in the years between 1648 and 1815 than to such developments in the following century. To be fair, he was inclined to view the 19th century as a golden age, precisely because international law had substantially completed its doctrinal development by the end of the 18th century. Thereafter, it was the rapid expansion of positive law and the professionalization of legal practice that warranted retrospective appreciation. In this story, doctrinal refinements are beside the point.
