The working paper ‘Embracing Discomfort: From Textbook to Scriptbook in Legal Education’ appears both in the EUI Law Working Papers series and through the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Research Papers. In it, Sarah Nouwen, Professor in the EUI Department of Law, and Wouter Werner, Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and former Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the EUI, rethink how international criminal law can be taught and understood. Instead of approaching the field through neatly organised casebooks and doctrinal summaries, they invite students to step into the courtroom. Their scriptbook is built from thousands of pages of International Criminal Court transcripts and becomes the basis for reenacting real trial scenes.
The idea emerged during Wouter Werner’s stay at the EUI as Fernand Braudel Fellow when he and Sarah Nouwen, in friendly conversations over a cappuccino, decided to organise the 2024 Academy of European Law summer school at the EUI around the reenactment of the International Criminal Court’s Ongwen trial. The preparation for that summer school quickly became a research project in its own right, offering a way to explore how performance, emotion, silence, and even confusion shape legal understanding in ways that traditional teaching cannot capture.
Below, both scholars reflect on how the project took shape, what reenactments reveal about the workings of international justice, and why a method built on embracing discomfort might be exactly what legal education needs in an era dominated by AI.
How did the idea develop, and what role did the EUI play in turning an experiment into something you wanted to work on more systematically?
Sarah Nouwen: The relationship between teaching and research here is really cyclical. We taught something, and it worked. People were excited about it and immediately asked if they could use the method elsewhere. That curiosity already raised research questions for us. Later we were invited to write about textbooks in legal teaching, and suddenly it clicked: What we had done at the summer school was precisely not a textbook exercise. But how do you put something on paper that took place on a stage? That’s how the idea of the scriptbook came about.
We are now writing that scriptbook based on the script we prepared for the summer school. But it doesn’t end there. We’ve been testing parts of it in across the world, including Argentina and China, and people keep saying: “Let me have the scriptbook, I want to use this.” So, we are developing the scriptbook on the basis of the script of the summer school so that others, too, can use it for teaching.
The EUI made this possible because at the EUI one genuinely has the freedom to design courses in original ways. At the EUI, I had already developed experiential learning courses, for instance ‘Editing a Law Journal and Negotiating Peace and Justice’. When Wouter came as a Fernand Braudel Fellow, our discussions about performance and experimental moot courts made us realise that the EUI summer school was the perfect place to try something like this.
Wouter Werner: It’s difficult to pinpoint the beginning, because the plot determines the beginning. But one important moment was the time I spent at the EUI writing about traditional moot courts versus more experimental ones. I had written a book on repetition and became increasingly interested in rehearsal practices. Everything with “re–” at the beginning captures my interest. Sarah said, “Why don’t we put these things together and test them at the summer school?” And the EUI made that possible. What I appreciate is that the line between teaching and research disappears here. Teaching becomes research; research becomes teaching. That feels very Brechtian and very academic in the best sense.
Your paper describes “discomfort” as something essential for learning, yet education often emphasises the need for safe spaces. What forms of discomfort emerges during the reenactments, and how do you see these working alongside and not against the idea of a safe learning environment?
Wouter Werner: There are two forms of discomfort. One is the discomfort that comes from realising how tidy textbooks make everything look. I remember my first law class where I felt relaxed because there was a legal category for everything. In reenactment, that falls apart. You suddenly see the absurdity, the boredom, the confusion of real practice. You hear long pauses, you sense uncertainty, you notice the mundane routines of the courtroom.
The second is the discomfort of performing. You have to say things you may not agree with. You might have to read the words of the defendant. It can feel uneasy or even morally challenging. But that tension is productive because it shows that something matters.
Safe space only exists because discomfort exists. You don’t need a safe space if everything is comfortable. The point isn’t to shield students but to create an environment where difficult things can be explored, processed, and reflected on together.
Sarah Nouwen: And that’s exactly where the reflection sessions come in. We never just reenact: the teaching method is reenactment plus reflection. And in reflection sessions, you can ask: “How did that make you feel?” That almost never happens in legal teaching where everything is very sterile. In ordinary legal teaching, one often starts with legal analysis and it’s usually all about definitions and elements of crimes. But international criminal law deals with atrocities! Through experiential learning, emotions genuinely have a place in the classroom. Everyone experiences something depending on their background, their history, their identity. The reflection session creates the safe space that traditional teaching never quite manages to build.
In reenactments, many elements of legal practice appear that never make it into textbooks. What did your research reveal about these overlooked moments, and why are they so important for understanding international justice?
Sarah Nouwen: The scriptbook captures things that textbooks almost never mention: translation mistakes, confusion about which document is being discussed, lost files, the complexity of numbering victims, the difficulty of knowing whether the court is in closed or open session. These practical procedural issues are fundamental to the practice of international criminal law, yet they are practically invisible in teaching.
And then there are things like coffee breaks. The desire for a coffee break structures the rhythm of the courtroom. You really notice that when you work through the transcripts. All of this became part of the reenactment. We selected what we thought was worth highlighting, but what ends up being discussed at the end during the reflection session depends entirely on the group.
Wouter Werner: All the doctrinal issues appear again, but as script. Doctrine becomes embodied. It determines characters, actions, the mise-en-scène of the courtroom. Law is not just definitions; it’s performance.
The auditive elements are particularly powerful. One of the most striking scenes is reading out the seventy counts from the document containing the charges. It goes on and on. People get bored, which feels completely inappropriate given the gravity of the crimes, and then they feel uncomfortable about that feeling of boredom. And after all that reading, the judge asks, “Do you understand the charges?” and the defendant says, “No”. The anti-climax is almost theatrical. You cannot arrive at that insight through traditional teaching.
Sarah Nouwen: And sometimes it’s the silent moments that speak the loudest, such as handing over a letter, hiding it from view, a handshake between the prosecutor and the president. In China, that handshake triggered a whole discussion about the politics of international criminal justice. Sometimes the unspoken has the strongest impact.
You have tested this method with participants from many backgrounds. What have these experiences taught you, as researchers, about how people from different contexts engage with discomfort?
Sarah Nouwen: Even if we ran the reenactment ten times at the EUI, we would get ten different outcomes. People arrive with very different experiences and relationships to the events. But reenactment creates a level playing field. Everyone has to speak words they’ve never spoken before and that breaks the ice among the participants. Everybody is already involved and can then afterwards speak freely about their experiences.
In China, with a very international group, the same thing happened. Before we even began the doctrinal discussion, the reenactment already made everything less hierarchical and more open.
Wouter Werner: When I did this with students from Rwanda, Suriname, Indonesia, and the Netherlands, the differences emerged in ways you cannot plan. Some Western students said “local spirituality” mattered, and Ugandan students said it would never work in their courts. These moments are far more honest and educational than assuming cultural differences in advance. The script does not impose cultural categories, but it lets them emerge from how people respond.
As you refine this approach, what directions do you see it opening for your research and for those who might want to build on it?
Wouter Werner: First, we need to finish the scriptbook. But beyond that, there are many research directions. I want to explore theatrical concepts that appear in the transcripts: absurdity, boredom, ritual. I’ve written about the theatre of the absurd in international law before, and this method brings even more possibilities to explore.
Sarah Nouwen: We are continually testing the scriptbook with different groups in different locations and with different facilitators. Their feedback is shaping the annotations. The goal is to make this a tool that works even in a short, one-hour session or in a big classroom. It’s not just for places that look like the EUI.
In a moment when AI can reproduce written answers with ease, what does your research suggest about the kinds of learning that AI cannot replace?
Sarah Nouwen: This method becomes even more important in a world of AI. Everything becomes artificial. AI can write essays and produce doctrinal answers. But AI cannot reenact. It cannot feel hesitation, discomfort, embarrassment, or the weight of saying something aloud that you don’t actually agree with.
Everyone is worried about how to examine students now. My answer is: Let them reenact. AI cannot take that over. It’s the sort of learning that remains fundamentally human.
Wouter Werner: A student I supervised once tested whether machine learning could detect the absurd in legal texts. It couldn’t. Absurdity isn’t inconsistency in data, it’s a bodily rupture, something you feel. That is why this method matters. It brings the human back into legal education.
Sarah Nouwen is a Professor in the EUI Department of Law and Co-Director of the Academy of European Law. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law.
Wouter Werner is a former Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the EUI and Professor of International Law at the Centre for the Politics of Transnational Law at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.