International norms, principles, and legal doctrines are always present in all histories of international law. Without them, the histories being narrated would arguably appear to be instead histories of something else. However, the extent to which these juridical identifiers are the central focus of the narrative, or recede instead into the background to different degrees until they occasionally become a silent frame of reference for the historical narrative, varies greatly across different approaches. The category of normative approaches to the history of international law belongs to the history of concepts within the general categorization of the ‘modes or forms in which history’ and, by extension, the history of international law ‘may be written’. As a form of conceptual history, normative approaches are commonly recognized as the prototypical illustration of what passes as international jurists´ history. This, according to Valentina Vadi, is a form of history written by international ‘lawyers [who] tend to be interested in the past for the light it throws on the present and consider it as “a self-contained universe”, tracing the genealogy of given concepts with little if any attention to the context’. This approach is generally distinguished from that of historians whose enquiries are oriented to casting light on the past for its own sake and not for what it allegedly ‘brought about’. Being less generally informed by a juridical form of functional presentism, their scholarly work is more receptive to historical professional methods and to the reconstruction of the particular historical context, intellectual, sociological, and otherwise, relevant to their object of historical research, with acute attention, as was seen in Chapter 2, to avoiding the pitfalls of anachronism and other related historical fallacies.