Breaking with the Past 229returned to Argentina and became a member of the Chamber of Deputies.
In 1852, he entered the Argentine consular ser vice and later served as his
country’s ambassador to Rus sia, Austria, Prus sia, and France. He also did
diplomatic work for the papacy.
Calvo’s fi rst scholarly contribution to international law was a translation
of Wheaton into Spanish. Th e fi rst edition of his own treatise, in Spanish,
was published in 1868. It devoted massive, even obsessive, attention to re-
cent and contemporary state practice, ballooning in size until, by the fi ft h
edition of 1896, it consisted of six very fat volumes. In the early editions of
the work, Calvo explicitly contrasted what he called “idealist” and the “posi-
tive” approaches to international law, although by the third edition he al-
tered “idealist” to “natural law.” His own approach, he forthrightly as-
serted, was the positive one, speaking “the language of facts” and being
guided throughout, in true scientifi c spirit, by a “rigid impartiality.”
In general, it may be said that the empirical variant of positivism held the
greatest sway in the Anglo- Saxon world. Its attraction to English- speaking
lawyers is readily explained by the clear similarity of its empirical and in-
ductive approach to the methods of the En glish common law, which was, in
large part, a law gathered from the practice of courts (in contrast to statu-
tory law). In fact, a particularly distinctive feature of English- speaking in-
ternational lawyers, from the nineteenth century onward, would be the high
regard in which they held judicial decisions (such as Scott’s admiralty- court
judgments) as sources of international law.
Among the English- speaking lawyers in the empirical positivist tradi-
tion may be mentioned several British writers of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. William Edward Hall was an in de pen dent, self-
s upp or t i n g w r it e r — a “ge nt le m a n- s c hol a r ” i n s ome w h at out d at e d p a rl a nc e —
with a strikingly clear and accessible writing style. John Westlake, from
Cornwall, was a professor of international law at Cambridge University in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the foremost British
scholar of his time. Th omas J. Lawrence, a British lawyer, worked on both
sides of the Atlantic, teaching for a time at the University of Chicago in the
United States and at the University of Bristol in En gland.
Th e empirical variant of positivism attracted some support among French-
speaking writers, too. An example is the fi rst major textbook on the subject,
by Th éophile Funck- Brentano and Albert Sorel. Funck- Brentano, a native