LAUSR

“Draft conclusion 3” of the first ILC report on the “general principles of law” expounds on two categories: general principles of law derived from national jurisdictions and those formed within the international legal system. This paper explores the drafting history of Article 38(1)(c) of the ICJ's Statute to investigate whether the Advisory Committee of Jurists, entrusted to frame a statute for the international court, had conceived the idea that, apart from domestic legal systems, the international legal framework could form general principles of law, or whether they were reluctant to endorse such an open-ended formulation which would give more liberty to judges to apply these principles as per their whims and fancies. The paper argues that the dual categorization of the general principles of law by the ILC has no substantive roots in the preparatory history of the ICJ's Statute and therefore it is purely an innovation by the ILC.