 These descriptive questions have a bearing on conceptual argument about the legal character of international law. If the main engines of rule-creation function only on the basis of consent, or depend on the belief and subjective mindset of those that those rules are meant to constrain, the legal character of international law would be, at best, severely diminished; or, at worst, lost entirely because international law would be robbed of the claim to legitimate authority inherent to law, a claim that its norms are binding simply as legal rather than as voluntarily or otherwise subjectively assumed.