ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to describe and explains an analytic approach directed to accomplish some quite different tasks. It presents a theoretical argument about the methodology of international legal scholarship. The chapter seeks to improve the advocacy skills of international legal arguers and practitioners. It aims to demonstrate a specific methodological style for explaining the interrelated structures of the two puzzles. The first puzzle is that international legal argument seems unstructured and indeterminate. The second major element of the puzzle of discourse is thus contained in the first. The chapter explores the connection between the realms of theory and practice. It develops a contradiction which seems to lie beneath actual discourse and scholarly theory. For some enthusiasts, the unstructured nature of international law results from its horizontal primitiveness. The distinction between the content and the form of international legal argument is only important because in traditional analysis it should be an argument's content which is persuasive.
