Dialogue concerning legal un-certainty and other prodigies

This is a slightly modified version of a dialogue we read on 8 September 2018 at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, in lieu of staging a traditional presentation of the lengthy paper we had filed with the organizers of the workshop on ‘Knowledge Production and International Law’. We were just trying to turn a liability – multiple speakers are even more prone than individual ones to exceed allotted timeslots – into an asset: we changed the format completely, so that instead of having before us a 27-page sheaf, we found ourselves nervously clutching a 6-page script on the unlikely stage of amphitheatre Jacques Freymond. But our strategy proved effective as far as time-keeping was concerned: we were allotted 20 minutes; we did it in less than 19. By casting the paper into a different genre we found ourselves changing the argumentative strategy to such an extent that a largely autonomous text grew out of what we had planned as a simple expedient. This short play on legal (un)certainty and international law inaugurated EJIL's occasional series "The Theatre of International Law".