Interpretivism, as I shall understand it here, is a theory on the nature of law.9 This means that it is committed to an understanding of the very concept of law rather than its particular manifestations in different times and places.10 Asking what is law is different from asking what is the law on a particular issue in a particular place because the former specializes in whether the idea of law has a nature, whether it has certain features by its very nature, and whether it has those features wherever it exists. I also sketch out the nature of work that needs to be undertaken in the future to develop a substantive interpretivist account of international law. I conclude by showing why interpretivism is an important and worthwhile approach to the central questions of international law. Internal objections stem from the view that Dworkinian interpretivism is not a suitable theory to apply to international law. External objections dispute interpretivist premises by invoking alternative premises. This is done in the third section by identifying two types of objections to the relevance of interpretivism to international law: external and internal.
The second task is to identify the possible objections to interpretivism's relevance to international law, assess how successful these objections are, and illustrate how they may be countered. This will be done in the second section of the article by giving an account of the central assumptions of interpretivism and how it goes about identifying law as a unique social practice. The first task is to draw out what the central features of interpretivism are which make it a theoretically distinct contribution to understanding the nature of law. This article is composed of two parts which correspond to the two key tasks that have to be completed in order to show the relevance of interpretivism to the general theory and practice of international law. His views refer to single political communities as background conditions for his substantive views on law.4 Dworkin, however, has written on the nature of law as a normative social practice and the adequacy and weaknesses of rival doctrinal philosophical camps such as legal positivism, pragmatism, natural law, legal realism, and anti-foundationalism in accounting for that normative nature.5 Given that all these doctrinal philosophical camps have extended to discussions on the normative nature of international law, irrespective of the fact that their roots are in the jurisprudence of domestic law,6 it is surprising that interpretivism has not received a comparable amount of attention. Dworkin has not written a full-length treatment of international law. Interpretivism1 as a general theory of law has been received with indifference by theorists of international law.2 A principal reason for this, according to Beckett, is that the work of Ronald Dworkin, the pioneer of legal interpretivism, concerns the attributes of law in a single political community and, therefore, does not have anything to say about international law.3 This is correct in the literal sense.
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