A Commentary in International Law

Commentaries on international law are monumental books: heavy and bulky, with gold-inscribed covers, they convey the importance of the scholarship involved even before we have read a single word. It is precisely these non-textual features of Commentaries this article is concerned with. Specifically, I try to show how a print Commentary incites a sense of the monumentality of international law in its users, and how this is largely lost in the move online. I do so by focusing on what Jerome McGann calls the ‘bibliographic codes’ of the book, by which he basically means anything besides its actual words. A Commentary’s size, weight and gold-inscribed cover, as well as its thin pages, small font size and the relentlessness of the seemingly endless text produce a sense of being part of something that exceeds the solitary legal work. We absorb all of these ‘codes’ without paying much attention to them, yet they matter to our sense of what it means to be part of the discipline of international law. A Commentary, then, moves us in ways that exceed our grasp and at the same time are irrefutably tangible. My aim here is to describe this experience.