7 - The Lyophilization of Life

Summary

The story moves into the inner quarters of international courts and tribunals, where judicial bureaucrats are studying the files and starting to prepare for the cases. This chapter tackles the seemingly innocuous, but in fact crucial task of summarizing the parties’ submissions. Far from purely mechanical, the drafting of summaries entails a series of fundamental choices about the nature and contours of the dispute. By distilling the irreducible complexity of life into a digestible set of claims and arguments, bureaucrats initiate a process of lyophilization that will eventually lead to a clean, apodictic, and self-contained ruling. At every step of the judicial process, certain lines of reasoning come to the fore while others are relegated to the margin of the analysis. Often, the final judgment bears only a faint resemblance to the setting in which the dispute initially arose.