I have also had the experience of sitting—though not silently—through deliberations in the ICJ. Often professors say, “Oh well you know, they were not quite clear where they were going because they had been ambiguous here.” The common law world of academia often misses the point spectacularly, because in common law courts—even when you have a lot of judges—the tradition is that a judge writes his or her own judgment, and either other judges agree or you have to distill the ratio decidendi of the case from the different judgments. It is a totally different exercise when the judges must produce a collective judgment, especially if they must produce it in more than one language. Had academics been a fly on the wall in the deliberations at the ICJ they would have known we knew exactly what we were doing: we did not all agree on the outcome, and this is a disagreement that has been reduced to writing in order to enable the court to move on.