Since Oscar Schachter’s articulation of the concept, scholars have attempted to better understand the ‘invisible college of international lawyers’ making up our profession. They have done this through piecemeal surveys of public professional rosters (arbitrators, International Court of Justice counsel), piecing together anecdotes of connections between members, or constructing stories about individuals’ role in discrete legal developments. Departing from these approaches, we use the obituaries published in the British Yearbook of International Law (1920–2017) to draw an interactive map of the ‘invisible college’. Obituaries are a unique window into international law’s otherwise private inner life, unveiling professional and personal connections between international lawyers and their shared career paths beyond single institutions or individual stories. Employing network analysis, a method commonly used in social sciences to describe complex social phenomena such as this, we are able to demonstrate the ubiquity of informal networks whereby ideas move, and provide evidence of the community’s homogeneity. Exploring connections between international lawyers and their shared characteristics in this novel way, we shed light on the features of this group and the potential impact individual personalities have on the law. These characteristics of the profession and its members are evident to insiders but externally invisible. Graphic representation is a powerful tool in bolstering critiques for diversity and contestation of mainstream law-making narratives. Rather than exhaustively mapping, however, we propose to take the ‘dead white men’ trope to an extreme, provoking the reader to question the self-image of the profession as an impersonal expert science.

中文翻译：

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通过讣告描绘“隐形的国际律师学院”

自 Oscar Schachter 提出这一概念以来，学者们试图更好地理解构成我们职业的“隐形国际律师学院”。他们通过对公共专业名册（仲裁员、国际法院律师）的零碎调查、拼凑成员之间联系的轶事或构建关于个人在离散法律发展中的角色的故事来做到这一点。与这些方法不同，我们使用英国国际法年鉴（1920-2017）中发表的讣告来绘制“隐形学院”的互动地图。讣告是了解国际法私人内心生活的独特窗口，揭示国际律师之间的专业和个人联系，以及他们超越单一机构或个人故事的共同职业道路。使用网络分析，一种在社会科学中常用来描述诸如此类的复杂社会现象的方法，我们能够证明思想移动的非正式网络无处不在，并提供社区同质性的证据。我们以这种新颖的方式探索国际律师之间的联系及其共同特征，阐明了这一群体的特征以及个体人格对法律的潜在影响。该行业及其成员的这些特征对内部人员来说是显而易见的，但在外部是不可见的。图形表示是支持对主流立法叙事的多样性和争论的批评的有力工具。然而，我们建议将“死去的白人”比喻发挥到极致，从而引发读者质疑该专业作为非个人专家科学的自我形象，而不是详尽的映射。