 Nor, contrary to many accounts, is customary international law, or custom, based on consent. Custom is defined in the Statute of the International Court of Justice as “general practice accepted as law” (Statute of the International Court of Justice, Article 38(1)). This definition is normally understood to comprise two elements: an objective one, i.e., the practice of States; and a subjective one, i.e., opinio juris, the acceptance of rules as custom. Many of the conceptual errors that afflict discussions of custom, with inevitable repercussions for theoretical arguments about international law, concern its subjective dimension. Two errors are common. The first one is to think of opinio juris as requiring state consent to a rule of customary international law. Acceptance and consent are, however, different concepts. The International Court of Justice regularly establishes the existence of rules of customary international law without specific evidence of consent from the states concerned (Talmon 2015). The second one is to describe the subjective element as necessarily involving a belief that a particular practice is already law.