Remembering Judge Cançado Trindade’s voice, faith, and integrity

Judge Antônio Augusto Cançado Trindade was a giant in the field of public international law. His career ticked almost every box one can think of – he was a beloved teacher and mentor with an influential list of publications, a legal advisor to the Brazilian government, a judge in two international courts, a member of the Institut de Droit international, and a frequent lecturer at, and member of the Curatorium of, the Hague Academy of International Law. I suspect that many students from Brazil, Latin America, and other parts of the Global South will have shared my own experience of looking up to him in awe and feeling proud that one of us went so far. There is much to be said about Judge Cançado’s accomplishments, but what I propose to do in this brief tribute is to offer some personal reflections about three attributes that, I think, make him a source of inspiration for the generations of international lawyers that succeed him. First, Judge Cançado had a truly unique voice. His writings, both as an academic and as a judge, reflected an intellectual attitude that was both fiercely independent and eclectic. In an interview that he gave to students at the University of Brasília shortly after his election to the International Court of Justice, he described himself as a ‘free thinker’ who believed that people should be allowed to search, unencumbered, for answers to the questions they encounter in their personal and professional lives.1 That sheds light on his readiness to express principled disagreement without feeling overburdened by institutional expectations; on the dynamic conception of law that he espoused, under which international law is approached as a creative and purposive endeavour rather than a mechanistic order that can be reduced to the will of states; and on the eclecticism of his legal reasoning, which was peppered with references to extra-legal sources, most notably literary works, deployed not only as metaphors and illustrations but also as ‘elements for having an answer’ for questions that conventional legal argument does not exhaust.2 At the same time, for all his playfulness, Judge Cançado took the task of offering substantive justifications for legal propositions very seriously. In his own words, ‘a judgment has to reason and to persuade’, for ‘[i]f the parties are not persuaded that that is what the law is, they’ll not abide by the judgment’.3