ABSTRACT
It may sound odd, but in practice, justice or fairness are hardly matters of concern for international lawyers. The rule that ‘lawyers find the law and do not make it’ could be seen as a basic tenet of all modern schools of legal thought. This necessarily results in a passive, apolitical attitude towards the notion of justice. For lawyers, justice is done when the law of the land or the law of nations is applied. The material content of this positive law will not be questioned, except for typical juridical investigations in the consistency of the normative system. Lawyers ‘find the law’ in the acts of the law-making bodies, whether they are governments in the national realm, or states and international organizations in the international sphere.
