Nuremberg and Grotius’s Scholarship as Non-Grotian Moments: On Novelty-Bolstering in International Law

Since its 1980s coining by Richard Falk, the ‘Grotian Moment’ concept has garnered popularity in international law discourse, denoting a rapid, paradigm-shifting development in international law. This concept builds upon a prevalent recollection of two past events as such paradigm-shifts. The first is, obviously, the ‘original’ Grotian Moment, anointing Grotius as the Father of International Law, mainly for publishing, in 1625, his ground-breaking treatise, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, which is said to had brought about a momentous paradigm-shift that gave rise to modern (statist and secular), or even the first-ever-effective, international law. The second event is the post-ww2 Nuremberg international trial. Presumably, from its mid-seventeenth-century birth to Nuremberg, international law was starkly statist, and so individuals had generally not been its subjects. This, among other things, meant that international criminal law (icl) was not acceptable. Nuremberg is, therefore, celebrated as the first-ever international criminal tribunal, as icl’s birthplace and even more generally as the turning-point in international law’s attitude towards the individual. Simply put, Nuremberg is considered the prototype of a modern Grotian Moment. However, this paper shows that neither 1625 nor 1945 were truly Grotian Moments (their significance notwithstanding) and present’s likely causes for those myths. The paper further reveals that these myths, as well as the current embrace of the ‘Grotian Moment’ concept, are all manifestations of a larger, understudied phenomenon: that internationalists, evermore obsessed with perceiving themselves as cutting-edge, too often satisfy that fix by erasing the past.