Interdisciplinarity and IL Scholarship

Larry Solum has kicked off an interesting exchange on interdisciplinary ignorance among legal academics. My question: how do international law scholars line up against their peers on this measure? My hunch is that IL scholars are more likely to have some interdisciplinary grounding than lawprofs in other fields, for two reasons.

First, there was the payoff of the quite conscious effort on the part of Anne-Marie Slaughter and others to build bridges between IL and International Relations theory. This has become so important a strain of IL scholarship that it’s almost a requirement to have some familiarity with IR theory by way of keeping up with the conversation. IR theory’s grounding in rational actor models also gives us all incentives to pick up on basic law and economics/game theoretic models, which is reinforced by the pervasiveness of these approaches elsewhere in the legal academy. IR theory at least ostensibly also values empirical approaches, which has drawn some IL scholars (Larry Helfer, Kal Raustiala, and Oona Hathaway are some notable examples) in that direction.

Second, I suspect that the nature of IL lends itself to interdisciplinary approaches more than other areas of law. It’s tough to be a straight doctrinalist in IL, given the paucity of credible positive IL sources. So you can’t get away with just talking about the cases, as one can in other fields (not to say that that makes the grade in other fields these days, but it’s still easier to use cases as, well, case studies, which perhaps demand less scholarly imagination than the relative void we face in IL). This all ties in with the lack of an IL canon. It’s been a fairly clean slate to work with, before which IL was unconnected not only to other disciplines but also other methods within the legal academy.

The other side of the story which Larry highlights: the relative ignorance of legal methods suffered by those in the social sciences. Until recently, ignorance of IL was something almost to boast about among the IR crowd. That’s obviously changed, in a very big way, the other payoff of the campaign to marry IR and IL. On a comparative disciplinary basis, then, I suspect that relevant social scientists (not just in political science but also in sociology and anthropology) are more up to speed than colleagues in other law-relevant fields. This may be all by way of saying, in yet another way, that these are good times for IL.