GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Document Type

Book Part

Publication Date

2026

Status

Forthcoming

Abstract

Sir Michael Wood’s remarkable career was deeply enmeshed in the pragmatics of international law; how to make it work as a part of the lawyering that occurs daily in foreign ministries, international organizations, and courts or tribunals. Yet that focus on practical lawyering did not allow him to eschew broader considerations of doctrine and even theory. While his work on the International Law Commission as Special Rapporteur for Identification of Customary International Law was motivated by a sense that national court judges struggled to understand the basic parameters of that source of law, the work necessarily entailed grappling with some of the more profound aspects of customary international law: when is there State consent by silence? what exactly is opinio juris? does practice by international organizations count? can regions really have customary rules different from global rules? And so on. While Sir Michael would prefer not to be known as a theoretician, his work on sources of international law took him some distance down that path and he repeatedly rose to the challenge.

This chapter honors those contributions by attempting to provide greater depth than has previously been advanced as to the possibilities for artificial intelligence to help in identifying and interpreting the sources of international law. The chapter proceeds by briefly recounting the established doctrine for identifying and interpreting those sources (II), briefly noting the remarkable (and rapidly developing) technological tool of artificial intelligence (III), and then indicating how that tool might be applied to the sources of international law. The chapter concludes by considering potential pitfalls in using AI for this purpose (IV).

GW Paper Series

2026-32

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