International lawyers have long recognised the importance of interpretation to their academic discipline and professional practice as new insights on interpretation abound in other fields international law and international lawyers have largely remained wedded to a rule based approach focusing almost exclusively on the vienna convention on the law of treaties. 1 interpretation in international law essentially refers to the process of assigning meaning to texts and other statements for the purposes of establishing rights obligations and other consequences relevant in a legal context interpretation is both a cognitive and a creative process on the one hand interpretation purports to establish a . The relevance of interpretation to the academic study and professional practice of international law is self evident as new insights on the practice and process of interpretation abound in other disciplines international law and international lawyers have largely remained wedded to a rule based approach focusing almost exclusively on the vclt. Until recently international lawyers largely associated interpretation with a limited set of objects treaties methods those found in the 1969 vienna convention on the law of treaties and functions the exposition of meanings in this short chapter i problematize such traditional understandings of interpretation in international law