Scholars increasingly seek to understand the driving forces behind change in international law. However, these analyses often tend to provide external forms of analysis that presume change can be identified without engaging with the actors, or looking at the law. This article takes the role of party pleadings in international dispute settlement as a means through which we can assess the influence of actors on law-making. Taking the development of the ‘control of the crime’ theory at the International Criminal Court as its object, the article scrutinizes legal change by dissecting the multifaceted role of pleadings. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and conducting quantitative analysis of citation patterns, content analysis of case law, and interviews with practitioners, it offers a novel methodological take and empirical insights into our understanding of what makes up legal change in international law, and how we can identify its meaning through different access points.