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