Guest Post: How Many International Law Books are Published in a Year?

[John Louth is Editor-in-Chief of Academic Law at Oxford University Press.]

I make it 401, but more of that below.

A few years ago when we carried out some research into law scholars’ habits we found many were telling us that there was so much being published that they didn’t even try to keep up anymore. I decided to try and see how difficult it would be to get a snapshot of just the books that published in one 12 month period – April 2014 to March 2015. The dates reflect two important cycles in my life: it matches OUP’s financial year and it marks the time between annual meetings of the American Society of International Law, the largest annual gathering of international lawyers (in the English speaking world at least).

The starting point for collecting titles was Jacob Katz Cogan’s invaluable International Law Reporter blog but due to the slightly different criteria for inclusion that I was applying I also went through publishers’ websites systematically. The result was 401 books published in English, French, and German.  No judgements about the quality of the scholarship were made – if it published in print, it was included. The full list in spreadsheet form and an explanation of the criteria for inclusion are available here. There is naturally a lot of room for debate about what I deemed to be “international” and what I deemed to be “law”. For each title I recorded the author/editor, language of publication, the publisher, and the subject area.

Statistical Overview

The top four publishers by number of titles were

1. 1. CUP (72)

2. 2. OUP (69)

3. 3. Brill-Nijhoff (56)

4. 4. Routledge (44).

Further behind we then have

1. 5. Nomos (25)

2. 6. Springer (24, or 27 if you include the 3 Asser Press titles they distribute)

3. 7. Edward Elgar (20)

4. 8. Pedone (19)

5. 9. Hart (18)

6. 10. Bruylant (11) and then a number of presses with between one and four titles in the list.

The linguistic split is 340 English, 36 French, 19 German, 5 French and English, and 1 German and English. The ratio of authored to edited books was 246 to 155.

Every title was assigned either one or two broad subject areas that it covered. The total figure for numbers of titles by subject therefore is greater than 401. Economic law broadly speaking (encompassing those titles on international economic law generally, plus those specifically on trade or investment law) accounts for the largest number (67), then human rights (53) and then war/peace/use of force issues (51).

The two institutions that had the most attention were the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court which were the subject of 7 books each. Breaking the coverage down geographically there were more books about China (8) than anywhere else, followed by the Polar regions (6).

“Hot” Topics?

There were

• 13 titles addressing issues of transitional or post-conflict justice
• 7 each on terrorism and cyber issues
• 6 each on corruption and economic/social/cultural rights, and
• 5 on climate change.

Book publishing obviously lags behind current events which might explain why there are still quite a few books on piracy (4) in the list but not yet anything specifically on Syria or ISIS. In terms of genres the big one is clearly the “Handbook” with 13 in the list spread between Routledge, Elgar, and OUP, but the second is the evergreen Festschrift with 12 having published in this period. Special mention should be made of a liber amicorum for Serge Sur published by Pedone which is not on the list as it appears to have only been available as a subscription item and doesn’t seem to be available any more. That is a great shame as it concludes with a chapter about the glories of hard-boiled eggs with mayonnaise, for many years an inexplicable lacuna in international legal scholarship.

Why Do Such a Survey?

I did this to step back from my role as an OUP editor and see what is going on outside of my list but also to assess what kind of a burden is being placed on those who are trying to stay abreast of scholarship in their field. For scholars and librarians I hope that it is simply useful to see a reasonably comprehensive list and make sure you haven’t missed anything. Beyond that though it is probably helfpul to reflect on the quantity of output, the languages, and the subject areas/topics that are being published on. What areas are over-saturated and which are in need of greater coverage? Is it a concern that such a high proportion of the single-authored books are based on doctorates or is that a healthy sign of new thinkers entering the field?

If there is interest we could try to make this an annual survey, hopefully including publications from more than the three languages covered (helpers would be needed though as my language skills are limited to English, French, and German).

To get a fuller picture we need to look at journals and the many hybrid forms of scholarly output (such as working papers or reports produced for international organizations) but that will take some more time due to the vastly greater quantity of material to be sifted through.  For now I hope that this inaugural survey is food for thought.