2 - The Interpreter’s Self

Summary

Most writings about treaty interpretation in international law are about how treaty interpretation should proceed and how treaty interpreters are constrained by various rules that discipline the interpretive exercise. Chapter 1 showed why rules by themselves cannot determine what treaty interpretation is and how it should proceed. This does not mean, however, that international lawyers are wrong in their self-perception that treaty interpretation is a constrained activity. This chapter argues that international lawyers have been looking for the source of interpretative constraints in the wrong place and that the actual interpretive constraints come from the fact that treaty interpretation is never the work of an isolated interpreter, but an exercise performed by a member of an interpretive community that determines what counts as a legitimate interpretation.