About the Mystery of International Criminal Law – An interview with Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE Chair of Public International Law) [Audio Available]

LSE Law Review · About the Mystery of International Criminal Law – An interview with Prof Gerry Simpson

In this special interview, LSE Law Review Notes Editor Vanessa Vohs1asks Professor Gerry Simpson (LSE Chair of Public International Law) about the mystery of international criminal law: why is the discipline heavily criticised and nonetheless still blossoming so much in academia and popular culture? Why does Professor Simpson enjoy teaching international criminal law at the LSE and who is his biggest critic? Finally, we discuss Professor Simpson’s forthcoming book “The Sentimental Life of International Law” and what gardening and friendship have to do with international law.

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): Thank you for listening to our first interview on the LSE Law Review. My name is Vanessa Vohs and I’m an LSE LLM student as well as a Notes Editor in the summer board of the LSE Law Review. Today we talk to Professor Gerry Simpson, Chair of Public International Law at LSE and fellow at the British Academy. He published numerous articles and prize-winning books on international law and international criminal law in particular. I personally got to know Gerry last year when joining LSE for my LLM (Master’s of Law). He taught the course International Criminal Law: Core Crimes and Concepts. The title, at least for me, raised expectations of digging deep into the ICC statute, discovering the legal content of the core crimes and the functioning of the court. However, I discovered early in our class that we would barely touch on the statute and the courts functioning. Instead, Gerry started talking about a rather unusual event happening in 1915 with the execution of the British nurse Edith Cavell. Henceforth, I figured out that we would not really have a commonly taught course about international criminal law. This course continued to be full of surprises, unexpected mysteries and nonlinear movements and disruptions in the history of international law. Gerry fascinated me and other students as a teacher of international law, and I was lucky to have him as my dissertation supervisor. And with this, let’s start our interview and let’s discuss your perspective, professor, on the broader picture of international criminal law and international law more generally. Thank you so much for being here with us.

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): Great, thanks, Vanessa. And what a lovely description of my course. I mean, in a way to start there, you describe more or less exactly what I intend to do with that course, which is to adopt what I call a “historical conceptual perspective” on international criminal law that avoids the usual landmarks. I haven’t thought of myself as consciously avoiding the ICC statute and so on, but I do. As you point out, it comes up to the extent that some of the main dilemmas in the field arise in our discussions. But I don’t sort of consciously move through the statute so that we understand modes of liability, superior orders and so on and so forth. So, I must say, just as an aside, I have a bit of a soft spot for the doctrine of superior orders because that’s how my whole academic career began back in 1985/1986 with that very subject, but we can discuss more of that later.

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): Absolutely. I think it was quite refreshing after a Bachelors in Law, and just discussing mostly the ICC statute and then going on to your course and having this fresh view on the history. This brings me also to my first question to you. So, when and why did you decide to teach international criminal law in this particular way, focusing on the disruptions rather than on the main events everyone knows?

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): Yeah, really good question. It happened both quickly and slowly. I mean, it’s taken me a long time to get to this point with my course at the LSE, where I feel that I’ve got what we might call a mastery of the material, which allows me to take the historical theoretical perspective – the perspective I’m more interested in with a certain degree of confidence. So, it’s been many years of experimenting with the reading guides, the structure of the course and with the approach that I might take to get me to this point. But it was quick in the sense that, as I said earlier on, I suppose my interest in international criminal law had two or three origins, rather like the field itself. One was that my father was very interested in the period of fascism in Europe in the late nineteen-thirties and early forties and used to speak to me a lot about it. And that got me interested in the problem of extreme violence, you might say, or extremely bad governments or what some people insist on calling evil. And so, when I went to law school, in a way, I expected to be confronted with these questions on a daily basis. That didn’t happen because the law is often a technocratic discipline, though I had very good teachers and I had a very intriguing jurisprudence course, but I sort of fell under the spell of a professor at university who was interested in international law, and interested in international criminal law. I put the possibility that I might write my dissertation, and I know you’ve just finished yours, so my equivalent dissertation, except at the undergraduate level. I put it to them, I would write on the defence of superior orders and compare Scottish police law to international criminal law. So, unusual choice of comparators in a way. And that immediately again immersed me in a lot of the conceptual material around superior orders, which goes to the heart of the psychology of human behaviour, of course. How are we to assess what a reasonable person would do in a particular situation when acting under duress in war? What does moral choice to use the Nuremberg language mean in that regard? Finally, my third origin was I was asked to write or co-edit a book with a colleague of mine, Tim McCormack in Australia. I volunteered to write the opening chapter, which was the introductory chapter. In a way, it set out everything I’ve been doing ever since – it was a pretty decent essay. I spent a long time not pursuing some of the thoughts in that essay, but I’m glad I’ve returned to it in a way, returned from the doctrine, to the concepts. Just one absolutely final point. I was very, very influenced, I have to say, by an LLM dissertation that a student wrote for me in 1992/1993 – a woman called Kim Reid, who didn’t, I think, ever work in international criminal law. She wrote a dissertation on history and international criminal law and the banality of evil. It was a quite brilliant piece with quite a bit of archival work, and I used that a bit in that opening essay. I credit her in it, but I don’t know what became of Kim. She may be working as a corporate lawyer now, who knows…

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): She might even listen to [or read] this and will be happy to have influenced you in a way. And I guess it’s also a great point of motivation for our listeners here. This also brings me to something that struck me a lot [when studying your course]. So, at the beginning, when the International Criminal Court was founded, you yourself described this initial period as being led by people that were cheerleaders of international criminal law – everyone was happy to finally have a court that prosecuted international crimes. But then when you now look at international criminal law articles, everyone seems to be quite critical. So why do you think international criminal law is still blossoming so much as a discipline or even in popular culture?

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): Yeah, it’s a good point. I think what’s happened, as you say, is that international criminal law has fallen into a certain amount of disfavour amongst both the intellectual classes and the political elites who seem less inclined to fund it or establish new international tribunals and so on. Maybe because it didn’t solve the problems that they said it ought to solve. I don’t think many international criminal law judges or lawyers ever felt it could solve the world’s problems or even the problems of conflict and morality themselves, but nevertheless, that was the burden placed on international criminal law for a long time. So, there’s a bit of disappointment, disaffection with the field of international criminal law in that sense. On the other hand, as you indicate, as a discipline – it’s well and truly flourishing. I mean, lots of people are writing interesting stuff on international criminal law. Christine Schwöbel-Patel’s new book on spectacle, for example, but there are many others. Work by Sara Kendall, Sara Nouwen and so on and so forth. Lots of people writing in this area, reconstructing the history á la Kevin Heller, doing interesting things with sort of cultural takes on international criminal law like Mark Drumbl, historical approaches like Lawrence Douglas and people renovating Hannah Arendt, and so on and so forth. So, that’s happening in popular culture. I mean, it’s interesting you ask that because I was on a panel just about a week ago on film and international law, and someone asked why it was that so many films and documentaries, that have international law as their topic, have specifically international criminal law themes embedded in them. I think part of the reason for that is because international criminal law seems more glamorous and more individualistic. It’s rather like the genre of the Hollywood film itself that focuses      on perpetrators, victims and anti-hero intervenors. [A type of] very, very powerful mythology in Hollywood, going back at least to the Western, but certainly including films like Rambo and even Apocalypse Now, perhaps in a complicated way and international criminal law repeats all that in a legal register.

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): So, you started already talking about something that is not quite legal, something that is related to popular culture. In the LSE Law Review, we recently published a post about the conscience of humankind – a common phrase used to justify international criminal law’s existence. So which role do non-legal themes such as humanity or other themes play in this field? And might international criminal law perhaps consist less of posited law as we think?

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): As you know, from my course and to a certain extent, this reflects some of the concerns of your own dissertation in international law. Perhaps the law generally, certainly international criminal law, tends to be a combination, let’s say, of what we might think of as formal textual rules, which we spent a lot of time studying, after all, as lawyers. And something we might call international legal consciousness, in other words, what we think about when we think about the law, the sorts of images that direct our attention to certain wrongs and direct our attention away from other wrongs, however understood in the conventional legal order. So, this international legal consciousness, we might say, is the creation of forces outside of written law or customary international law, however you want to describe it. And it’s produced by all sorts of things: it’s produced by cultural artefacts like the novel or is it representative moments in legal culture, like the O.J. Simpson trial or the Nuremberg war crimes trials. And it’s produced by film, so that when lawyers are applying law, even when judges are applying law, I think this international legal consciousness sort of acts on their decision making, no matter how sort of positivistic they are. Somebody once said in an essay that when the Justice Department lawyers during the period of the Bush administration were discussing what to do with the Guantanamo Bay detainees, they quoted from the TV series 24 more often than they did from the U.S. Constitution. 24 was famous for having a lead character, a former US agent who engaged in acts of torture against suspected terrorists – in fact, he tortured lots of people, he tortured colleagues and so on. Torture was the main theme in this series 24, which was a big hit about 10-15 years ago, in fact more than that. And that film, that TV programme, acted as a kind of cultural legal precedent for the treatment of the Guantanamo Bay detainees. In some ways, it was more influential than the U.S. Constitution. So legal consciousness, I think, is just a broader topic than international law, properly so-called as some of the treasonous writers like to put it. I think that’s how I would describe the wider view, [although] one has to be a bit careful about that sort of thing. I remember being at the Royal Courts of Justice once when one of the lawyers quoted from the New York Times, a piece that Ronald Dworkin had written in the New York Review of Books. And the judge said ‘so the New York Review of Books is a precedent now, is it?’, indicating that he didn’t believe that that was the case. So, we have to be a bit careful about this.

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): I see. So, we talked a bit already about anniversaries and the birth date of international criminal law. The desire of lawyers to put certain dates to beginnings [or] to have certain periods of time that we can refer to and then move on to talk about new moments in time. But I would also like to ask something about the desire of baptizing moments and giving them certain names. So, you coined yourself the term “Tokyoberg” as the mingling of the Tokyo Tribunal and Nuremberg. Lemkin also was somehow desperate to further his brainchild “Genocide”, and Philippe Sands now is fighting for the inclusion of “Ecocide” as a crime under international criminal law. So, where is this passion coming from? And do we sometimes maybe go too far by pinpointing events in a certain manner and giving them a name?

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): I think that’s a danger. As intellectuals, we like to coin new phrases, and I thought “Tokyoberg” was quite clever in its own way, partly because I had got fed up with saying Nuremberg and Tokyo the whole time. I had spent a long time sort of insisting on the inclusion of Tokyo in that 1945-48 moment. It’s the great sort of forgotten trial. It’s no longer, in many ways, it can no longer be described quite in those terms. [However,] for a long time, I think it could. I suppose the period I spent in Melbourne helped make more visible the Tokyo trials since there was a lot more interest in Australia or Australasia or in Southeast Asia in that trial than there was, say, in Europe, where the focus was almost entirely on Nuremberg. So, “Tokyoberg” seemed to make sense in that sense. [Although] I think “ecocide” is a different matter. It’s not so much to inaugurate a moment but to create a new crime. [But going back to your original point] the search for neologisms that somehow represent or describe or articulate a mood in the discipline is a powerful force that we have, and it goes back, as you say, to this idea of baptizing particular moments of origin. The search for origins itself is a controversial topic. What are we trying to do when we search for origins, what are these origins doing? What is it about the precedent that makes us demand an origin for it or demand a particular species of origin for it? So, I think we should have a healthy suspicion and scepticism towards origins. But as you say, we’re in a way stuck with them. We’re certainly interested in them in international criminal law. And I teach a course about origins, really. I mean, as you know, I go back to 1915 and posit a sort of alternative origin in the attempt to tell a dissident history of international criminal law that emerges from 1915 rather than from 1945. And I think the reason for that was because 1915 is a more complicated moment ethically, and I think international criminal law is a complicated project. 1945 feels less complicated on first blush because the Nazis were and have been represented as the world historical representatives themselves of world historical evil. [Therefore,] to prosecute the Nazis seemed like a natural thing to do, and still does to many people, in a way that prosecuting the Kaiser didn’t seem nearly as natural or inevitable. So, it’s a strike against history as inevitable, if you like.

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): I would now like to zoom out a bit and talk more generally about international law. I should probably also briefly mention that you’re currently working on the last bits of your forthcoming book, The Sentimental Life of International Law, which will be published this year. In it, you touch upon various themes that seem to be, in the first place, unrelated to international law or rather uncommon, I’d say. You talk about sentimentality, language, psychoanalysis, literature and longing. How do you relate those themes to international law?

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): Well, with great difficulty, perhaps, is one answer to that question. I was very influenced by something the historian Hayden White once said. He said every discipline is constituted by that which it forbids its practitioners to do, and it got me wondering what international lawyers were forbidden from doing and why this forbidden territory might be interesting. And this, of course, got me thinking about Freud, who very much focused on the sort of missteps, the mistakes, the hidden [and] the accidental. All those things that are said in a therapeutic context that weren’t meant to be said. And he said, if you ever feel an aversion to saying something in a therapeutic session, ‘say it!’ was his command and that sort of first basic rule of psychoanalysis. And I wondered what it was international was averse to saying, what it was forbidden from saying, or what sort of missteps, mistakes, errors, quips, ironic asides might be useful for thinking about how international law works. Initially, this just seemed like an idea I might pursue for 12 minutes in a lecture or maybe an essay, but it just took off from there, and I began to explore topics that really didn’t seem to have much international legal relevance, like comedy and laughter being one very obvious example. There’s a chapter on irony. There’s a chapter on friendship, which is, I think, more obviously connected to international law. And then there’s a chapter on gardening as well.

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): It’s interesting that you mention friendship because this is also something that is quite visible in international criminal law. I mean, we talked about the conscience of humankind, which is linked, of course, to the idea of an enemy of mankind that needs to be punished, originating in the pirate and now going further to the terrorists, perhaps. So how do you believe that this Schmittian [dichotomy] of friend-enemy influenced the development of international law more generally. Do we always need to distinguish between them?

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): Yeah, I think something happened to the friend-enemy distinction. Or rather, I think Schmitt thinks something happened to the friend-enemy distinction at the beginning of the 20th century, which is why his story intersects with mine and why I’ve been influenced by his thinking. I’m willing to accept that a friend-enemy distinction operated in international relations, maybe even in international law in the 19th century and before. In other words, politics was marked by a relationship between friends and enemies, in which friends treated the enemies as legal persons with certain entitlements, the way we sometimes respect our enemies in local disputes. I think this goes back to Nietzsche partly and the idea of the star friendship. The idea that an enemy can always be converted at some point into a friend, and that we perhaps should treat our enemies as if they might be brutal friends or soon to be friends or former friends. We know that the most powerful enmities are those between former friends and the most powerful friendships are sometimes created of, out of enmity – the person you have a fight with in the schoolyard and then suddenly becomes your best friend. The next day is a very common trope in literature and life, so I think this friend-enemy distinction was very powerful and it was reflected in legal rules. I guess one way of thinking about the 20th century is to say that friendship became compulsory or more authoritarian or more unitary. The friend became the friendship group, and like many friendship groups in the playground, it was constituted partly by its outsiders and its deviants. This friendship, which is very different from Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction; this friendship is a friendship of the collective – you call it humanity, we can call it the international community, the universal, or the tribunal, perhaps. And it’s this idea of the conglomeration or coalition of friends acting against outsiders who are no longer even enemies. They are, as Schmitt would have put it, they’re pirates no longer entitled to enemy status. This seems to me to be a mark of not just international criminal law, which reflects [this] almost exactly, but in international relations more generally, where we find it really hard to accept that we simply have enemies in that 19th-century style. [Instead, we think] that our enemies must somehow be terrorists or pirates or deviants. We see this in Afghanistan to a certain extent where we can’t…to take a 19th-century view of the Afghan war, we can’t seem to accept that we’ve been defeated in war. Maybe a 19th-century journalist or politician would accept that we’d been defeated by another power in war, and we withdraw gracefully. Nowadays, we have to position our defeated enemies or even our victorious enemies as terrorists. And I think there’s a big effort being made in Afghanistan to do that in the media. To try and find out just how bad the Taliban is. I think this is a death wish, almost. But people want the Taliban to be terrible because that will somehow justify something about this war. The Taliban’s moderate behaviour or moderate statements, at least, are proving to be a bit of a disappointment for the Western media in this regard. The same thing happened to Iraq. The Iraqi resistance was converted into insurgency or terrorism very quickly in 2003. So, this is the way in which the enemy is constantly de-emnified, we might say, to use a really clumsy term.

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): Talking about friendship, there’s also a more personal question I wish to ask. So, usually in politics, one says, there are no friends because you’re always in competition [with] one another. How does it look for you personally? Do you have friends in the international law bubble and how does it work despite some sort of competition among international lawyers?

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): Yeah, there’s that famous phrase by de Gaulle, something about France has no friends, only permanent interests. There are lots of phrases along those lines in the sphere of international diplomacy or in international relations literature, except that, of course, to stick with the geostrategic for a second, we know that friendship has played an enormous role in how we understand international politics. Throughout my lifetime, perhaps the single most important international political fact is that the United Kingdom is friends with the United States. It’s almost impossible to conceive a situation where we wouldn’t be friends with the United States, it takes a real leap of the imagination to think outside that particular box. Almost everything else that happens in international relations seems a bit unlikely. But the thing that’s truly unlikely is the idea of a breach in that friendship. And what’s the friendship based on? I think the further you dig into it, the more you realize it’s based on friendship. So, friendship, to me, seems like a very powerful idea that goes relatively unexplored. We think in terms of treaty or weaponry. We think what defines how we behave is how many weapons we have or the series of treaties we might have entered into to take a legalistic view of these things with X, Y or Z. But there seems to be this more amorphous thing called friendship that’s dominating our thinking at every turn. It has a very cultural aspect; it’s a form of, if you like, white internationalism in some places. My friend Chris Gevers, a student of mine at Melbourne, is writing on white internationalism. It’s clear that white internationalism is the internationalism of friends who happen to share the same skin colour in a way. So, this idea of friendship is very, very important.

For me in the field, some of my best friends are international lawyers as they say, and that will obviously continue to be the case. And I think that, in some ways, theoretical subdisciplines, or theoretical schools in any discipline – but I guess particularly in international law – are really a gathering of people with a similar sensibility as much as anything else. A similar disposition, maybe a similar sense of themselves in the world or a sense of humour. I don’t know what it would be rather than a belief in the oscillating tendencies of apology and utopia, or a deep commitment to international legal structuralism, or a single belief in empire and international law. It’s not that, so much. It’s something much more. It’s something much more obscure and nuanced than that brings people together in the international legal field. I mean, it’s not exclusively that. There are certainly methodological predispositions that bring together people in a school: a sense that history counts, a sense that that history is a history of violence and oppression, and a sense that history had an imperial, an imperial core, a core-periphery aspect. These things are held in common by certain people in certain schools. But I think there’s a lot more going on than that, just as there’s a lot more going on in the international field itself.

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): Switching once more off the topic, coming from friends to gardening: you already mentioned that one of your chapters in your new book will touch upon the practice of gardening. Could you give us a little preview of what you wish to emphasize by comparing international law with gardening?

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): Well, the chapter on gardening… I guess two things were happening when the chapter on gardening arose. One is, I was constantly coming out with the wrong answers to questions or being asked the wrong questions, in public events, and so on. I came across either as a kind of smarmy know-it-all or alternatively somebody who just didn’t know the answer to questions because he was refusing to answer them. And I think this partly boiled down to an idea that I didn’t, and many people who are of a similar ilk to me, didn’t have a positive story to tell about the international system, that there perhaps was a lack of redemption in the stories we were telling them. Let’s say liberals, who may be people we disagree with. Maybe not, we’re a little bit liberal deep down as well, I suppose. But the liberal international order had a more upbeat story about the transformation of the international order into a group of democratic states or a universal democracy, or whatever. A much more positive, upbeat story about the movement of trade and the economy and so on and so forth. And our story      tended to be very downbeat, a bit depressing [by comparison]. It’s all about empire, it’s all about poverty, it’s all about crime, and so on and so forth. So, I tried to work out what that story might be, and I was influenced a lot by people like Fredric Jameson and Philip Allott. Allot’s focus on legal consciousness/ social consciousness and Fredric Jameson’s anti-anti-utopianism, the idea that in order to act in the world for virtuous ends, one had to be very wary of utopianism, given all its disasters in the 20th century. I include capitalism as a utopia here now. You know, people say Maoism, communism, I think capitalism is turning into one of those utopias as well. It’s sort of self-destructing. Slightly in the same way because it’s committed to a single ideology, just as communism and Maoism were. So that when confronted with these utopias, it’s not enough to be anti-utopian because if you’re anti-utopian, you’re simply rejecting every radical reform proposal that comes along. So, I think the idea is to adopt a kind of anti-anti-utopianism. Be against those who are constantly down on utopias while being very, very aware that utopianism has its dangers. One way around that problem for me was to think about imagination, what it might be to imagine a different sort of international law and how we might do it. I guess my belief was that the most we can do at this point is to hint indirectly at what these sort of, at what Jay Winter calls minor utopias, might be, that we can’t come along and say, you know, there should be a global Parliament or there should be an international criminal court for the environment. These seem like 20th-century ideas that have already failed and that we need to try to do something different. And my “different” was to offer up sort of four vignettes where the gardening or the pastoral had offered us a different way into an international law, not necessarily a common way. It’s hard to describe precisely what it is. But I hope that people who read the four vignettes and my description of them are persuaded that there might be something there to think about when they are asked the same old question, “well, what would you do?” Which is a question that we all find very difficult to answer because critique is terribly difficult. But proposing something after critique turns out to be even more difficult.

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): This was a great preview, I guess, for some listeners. After your publication, [they can] read the final chapter about gardening. And here, maybe in the final block, I would like to ask you some more personal questions, too, that are not so much about international law to finish this interview. So, despite your very critical take on international law, international criminal law, why are you still happy to teach international law at the LSE and like to write about it?

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): Well, it’s funny. I was asked this question in my job interview by Neil Duxbury. Pretty good question. One way to answer this question is to ask ourselves who we spend most of our lives criticising. And the answer is the people we love. I don’t spend my life going on about how terrible Boris Johnson is, or Bolsonaro is. I talk about how, you know, what my sister has done recently, or what my best friend did, or, you know, what people on the political left have done that feels to me like a failure of leftist principles. It’s the people that we’re most in alliance with, that we tend to adopt the most critical attitudes towards. So, it’s very easy for me then to answer the question, “Why do I teach international law when I criticise it?” The answer is it would be inconceivable to teach as an international lawyer, indeed, I think, as any lawyer, without taking a critical perspective on the field. And of course, any lawyer will say that. There’s no point in just teaching what the law is. The only way you’ll train lawyers is to get in to imagine what might go wrong with the law, the flaws in the law, how they might be remedied, how those remedies themselves might be flawed and so on and so forth. [Indeed this describes] the development of the common law itself, one might say. And so, for me in international law, this is very much an attempt to try and get people to understand, that what people call the critique of international law, arises from an initial belief that its redemptive capacity and a disappointment that that redemptive capacity is kept at bay so often in ordinary everyday international lawyering, and an attempt to make visible those redemptive possibilities in the field. So, it’s very much an act of affection. And I think if I was to say something about the way my teaching has developed over the years, is that I’ve tried to bring out that aspect much more. But it’s a bit of a losing battle because students leave my class thinking, “oh my God, it’s so sceptical, so critical, I’m so depressed, can I go on, when is my next job at the ICC?” You know, it’s that kind of thing. But I do want to, much more, emphasise that aspect of it. And I’ve tried over the last three or four years to be, to do that rather than just come along as someone with a slightly depressive instinct about international law every year.

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): I think for students coming to the LSE, taking your course, it might be at the beginning a bit difficult to try to challenge your views and try to engage in criticism with you. And therefore, I would like to ask you, who is your biggest critic?

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): [Giggles] My biggest critic? Well, while I’m thinking of that, I just wanted to add something to that previous question, which is that I’ve been having tennis lessons recently. What’s happened with my tennis is that the teacher is deconstructing my forehand. So, I had a very flat forehand, which was, you know, fairly effective 75% of the time, but I never really hit outstanding Federer-like shots with it. The teacher came along and taught me how to hit a topspin forehand. In other words, critiqued my swing. My tennis is a lot worse since those lessons because I’m not pulling those shots off. But I’m aiming for something in the distance [that] will someday look like a topspin forehand. And I think in a way my international criminal law classes [are centred] around about the same point. It’s a moment of deconstruction. I’ve lost my forehand. I don’t know where I sit anymore, people are saying, but out of that I hope comes a very powerful topspin forehand.

My critics? I mean, I write for a lot of different people. When I write, I imagine lots of people. I imagine my friends Catriona Drew and Sundhya Pahuja in my field reading the stuff. I sometimes think about James Crawford, who died recently and was a kind of mentor figure to me and many other people. I didn’t know him that well, but I did have significant encounters with James. He seemed like the sort of neo-positivistic international lawyer who nevertheless had a very capacious understanding of the history of international law and its flaws, and I often find myself writing for him or writing in conversation with him. And there are many other contemporaries, of course, that fall into that category.

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): Ok. One last question, what advice would you give incoming LSE Law students?

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): Well, I think you should enter LSE with a sort of open mind and open heart. In fact, John Rawls ends A Theory of Justice on that sort of note, which is not something you’d expect from Rawls. It’s a slightly differently-phrased sentence, but it’s something along those lines. That law can only be approached in that way, obviously with rigour and attention and so on, but it’s the open mind and open heart that I would focus on – if that’s not too sentimental.

Vanessa Vohs (LSE Law Review): I think it fits perfectly to your new book, The Sentimental Life of International Law. Thank you for ending it on this great note. It was a pleasure talking to you, Professor Gerry Simpson.

Prof Gerry Simpson (LSE): Great. Thank you, Vanessa.

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[1]The interviewer would like to thank the LSE Law Review and LSE Law Review Alumni Editor Kevin Gerenni for helping to prepare and edit this interview.

Vanessa Vohs

BA International Relations (TU Dresden) 20′, LLM Public International Law (LSE) 21′ and Public International Law Notes Editor of the LSE Law Review Summer Board 2021