The Spiritual Exercises of Antonio Cassese and the Re-Forming of a ‘European Tradition’ of International Law

Abstract

Abstract This article describes Antonio Cassese’s vital influence on the ‘European tradition of international law’ through an attentiveness to those specific activities through which Cassese, as heir, received this tradition and through which Cassese, as ancestor, transmitted it. The specific activity that the article chooses to describe is that of writing – one of the several activities through which a tradition might be transmitted and received. It does so especially through close readings of several pieces of international legal writing wherein Cassese explicitly sought to dialogically redescribe the practices of an older generation of Euro-American international lawyers, including The Tokyo Trial and Beyond (1994) and Five Masters of International Law (2011). This training repertoire is his ‘spiritual exercises’, and, as the article shows, it invites others to take up their role as international lawyers and to conduct themselves as international lawyers in a specific way by cultivating in them conscience as a capacity to actualize judgment in the world.