In 2021, the French government commissioned two reports on episodes of extreme violence involving France's past: the Algerian War and the Rwandan genocide. Both reports grapple with how “the past haunts the present and the future,”3 a theme that is central to Karen Knop's scholarly legacy. In both reports, legal, historical, and archival expertise are positioned to redraw and recast relations of France to Africa. We argue that the reports’ focus on the role of a particular class of experts (namely archivist and historians, rather than lawyers) reflects France's current approach to narrating historical injustice, emphasizing public memory of violent pasts, rather than legal responsibility of the French state.

The 150th anniversary of the Institut de Droit International (IDI) and the International Law Association (ILA) provides an opportunity to assess the role of legal scholarship in the codification and institutionalization of international law. This essay argues that academic expertise is a form of social and political capital that is at once individual, institutional, and structural. Empirically focused on international dispute settlement mechanisms (interstate adjudication and arbitration), this essay underscores that academic expertise shapes the professional status of international lawyers, and influences the clout of international institutions as codifiers of international law.