I am grateful to Paul Morrow for his thoughtful comments and questions about my book. I will use this response to address three main issues he raises. First, Morrow points out that, in practice, the difference between technocratic legal experts and principled activists is not as clear-cut as the book suggests. Indeed, some of the technocratic criminal code drafters I discuss in the book, like the Swiss legal scholar and judge Jean Graven, were strongly motivated by principled commitments to international criminal law. Nevertheless, from the perspective of my argument, whether some technocrats may possess tacit principled commitments to atrocity prohibition is less important than how their commitments are perceived by policy makers. Governments, especially repressive ones, are more likely to entrust the writing of new legal codes to individuals whose authority is perceived to rest on their technical expertise and commitment to professional craft as opposed to those whose authority derives from their moral commitments or activist record. Ultimately, it is this perception of apolitical commitments that gives experts access to advance their professional and principled beliefs in the first place.

Morrow also questions what he perceives as a “presumed tension within the book between the political posture of ‘law and order’ and the decision to undertake criminal code reforms.” I agree with Morrow that these two aims need not be in tension. The case of Colombia, which I discuss in the book, is illustrative. From the government’s perspective, the 1936 criminal code was ill-suited to addressing the country’s growing violent insurgency, so reform was partly meant to enable the government to better instrumentalize criminal law against the rebels. What is noteworthy for the book’s argument is that even when a government decides to undertake the wholesale rewriting of a legal code as a pretext to increase its own power, it must usually cede some control of the drafting process to technocratic legal experts. There are both practical and political reasons why this is the case, and I discuss these in the book. But the point is that even governments that initiate the drafting of new codes to increase the repressive capacity of the law often end up, to some degree, empowering technocrats to advance their own preferences, which may, in other ways, reduce the law’s repressiveness.

Finally, Morrow asks whether the concept of technocratic legal borrowing could be enriched by more attention to work, such as that on norm localization and translation, that highlights the complex dynamics conditioning the domestic reception of international norms. It is certainly true that drafters of new criminal codes do not always copy and paste from borrowed models without modification or contestation—though it is remarkable how much direct copying-and-pasting one can observe. Nonetheless, I agree that there are opportunities to investigate the more interactive dynamics around technocratic legal borrowing as a next step in developing the concept. For example, drawing on the types of ideas Morrow suggests, it would be illuminating to interview technocratic drafters of criminal codes about how they respond to resistance by policy makers to including provisions borrowed from other sources and when these different strategies are effective.