International Law and Justice Working Papers - IILJ

Bulmerincq’s international law reflected who he was. But he never tried to hide who he was
either. Typically for us, lawyers, his own subjectivity never seemed to be an issue for him. In the
time of Bulmerincq, national identity was so self-evident for most intellectuals in the legal
academia that no one was surprised when an international lawyer also argued as patriot of his
country.
As Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there are two Bulmerincq’s: Bulmerincq the protagonist for
‘positive’ international law who advocates the expulsion of the politics from the legal discourse
and Bulmerincq the German patriot and pamphletist for various (mostly conservative) political
causes. It was less contradictory as long as the positions authored for different purposes and
audiences were printed in different fora such as the legal “Revue de droit international et de
législation comparée” and the cultural-political “Baltische Monatsschrifte”. But sometimes, as in
particular in “Praxis, Theorie and Codification des Völkerrechts” (1874), Bulmerincq the
international lawyer and Bulmerincq the political pamphletist met, got blurred and contradicted
each other. Already for his positivist successors such as his disciple Carl Bergbohm, this
amounted to a professional failure. There was either an amount of hypocrisy or professional
short-sightedness contained in this kind of inconsequent “positivist” approach. It was true,
Bergbohm wrote on Bulmerincq, that the latter had been working in the period when the state of
general theory of international law was yet weak and there was no clarity about sources. But
Bergbohm also was compelled to conclude that Bulmerincq finally lacked “the sharpness of
definition and the energy for uncompromising defence of subjective ideas from the system of a
science promising objective truths”. 155
155 C. Bergbohm, August von Bulmerincq, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, Bd. 47, S. 348-350 at 349.