Looking at both sides of the Atlantic, d’Aspremont challenges the narrative that pits international legal formalists against non-formalists and the common assumption among international lawyers according to which Europeans are more wedded to formalism – generically understood as the acknowledgement of the constraining role of legal forms – than their realist American counterparts. He explores two sides of the narratives, the “East Atlantic tale” and the “West Atlantic tale,” with the aim of showing that both Europeans and Americans continue to demonstrate attachment to legal forms. The only significant differences between them lie in the way in which they seek to reinvent formalism and the role of legal forms