 Welcome back. In order to identify the various sources of international law, most textbooks usually refer to one treaty provision, namely Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Now, as we have seen before, the ICJ is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations and was preceded by the Permanent Court of International Justice at the time of the League of Nations. The Statute of the ICJ is very much a cat and paste of the Statute of the PCIJ, which was drafted in 1920 by an advisory committee of jurists chaired by a Belgian senator and professor, Baron Édouard Descens, who by the way was teaching at Louvain. Before reading Article 38, it is important to remember the historical contexts of its drafting. In 1920, for the first time in the history of mankind, it was agreed to establish a permanent court and trusted with the task of settling international disputes between states. Of course, various arbitrations had taken place before, on a case-by-case basis, and each time, or at least very often, when agreeing to go to arbitration, the disputing states indicated to the arbitrators what law, which treaty they had to apply in order to reach a binding decision. And by the same token, it was felt necessary to point the various sources of international law to the future court. But a standing institutionalized court represented a real novelty at the time and somehow it was a bit frightening to states. The risk was to see the court deciding cases on the basis of a certain sense of justice. The fear was the issue of judge-made law at a time when international law was not so much developed and was rather rudimentary. In order to reassure potential disputing states and to make the findings of the court more or less predictable, it was felt necessary to rather strictly define the straight jacket within which parameters of which the court was entitled to function and to base its judgments upon. And with that in mind, let us turn to Article 38. Article 38 is the last provision of the second chapter of the ICJ statute, which is entitled Competence of the Court. So defining the law that the court must apply in order to settle dispute is a matter of competence of jurisdiction. In other words, and strictly speaking, the court has no competence to settle dispute by the application of other rules than the ones enumerated by Article 38. As we shall see in Week 7 when addressing the settlement of international disputes, this is probably a little bit far-fetched, but the general idea that the court is not entitled to settle disputes by the application of rules that are not rules of international law is generally speaking essential. Well, please now turn to the text of Article 38.