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International law does not simply rise or fall, but it takes on new forms, constantly reshaped by shifting historical constellations. That is the conviction running through Georg Nolte’s life in law: from divided Berlin to MPIL’s seminar rooms and, today, the bench of the International Court of Justice.
Tracing his path from a young comparativist at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law to a judge at the World Court hearing cases on war and planetary crisis, Nolte revisits Cold War paralysis, the brief euphoric upswing of the 1990s UN, and the contested Kosovo intervention. Encounters and collaboration with mentors like Jochen Frowein and Thomas Franck become professional and personal markers in a shifting landscape where the promise of “constitutionalisation” collides with global power dynamics.
Rather than deploring the “end” of international law amid today’s Security Council deadlock, Nolte recasts the field as a dynamic series of crises and reactivation. Old texts, he argues, can suddenly regain force and credibility when political constellations change.
In dialogue with Jannika Jahn and Alexandra Kemmerer, Nolte turns a personal institutional memory into a broader reflection on international law’s history and present.
This interview was recorded on 8 December 2025 at the Peace Palace in The Hague.
About Georg Nolte
Georg Nolte is a judge at the International Court of Justice and one of the leading voices in contemporary international law. In his formative years at MPIL, he focused in particular on freedom of expression, military intervention by invitation, and the changing role of the United States within the international legal order. His career as an academic combined professorships in Göttingen, Munich and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with service on the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe and membership of the UN International Law Commission, including his mandate as Special Rapporteur on “Subsequent agreements and subsequent practice in relation to interpretation of treaties” and his ILC-chairmanship 2017, before his election to the ICJ.
