Does Kosovo lie in the Lotus-Land of freedom?

This paper finds that the ICJ’s Kosovo Advisory Opinion reached the right result, but in amethodologically not fully satisfactoryway. It examinesfive aspects that underpin the opinion:the temporal (purely ex post) perspective; the Court’s equation of legal conformity and nonprohibitionand the idea of a deliberate silence of international law; the applicability of theLotus principle that was evoked by numerous states in the proceedings; the structural analogiesbetween international law and private, criminal, or public law; and the oscillation betweenlegal positivist and jusnaturalist paradigms. Finally, the paper argues in favour of proceduralrequirements for the international lawfulness of secession, and claims that this approach iscompatible with the findings of the Advisory Opinion.