International Law and Interdisciplinarity: A Workshop on Socio-Legal Methods

Professor Elena Baylis hosted a really terrific workshop on socio-legal approaches to international law at the University of Pittsburgh last week.  Elena has a blog post up at Intlawgrrls that explains how the workshop came to be.  As one of the law professors in a group that was split evenly between anthropologists and legal scholars, I learned a lot about anthropological methods (in particular, ethnographic research and some of the debates within anthropology about what makes a particular study an ethnography) and was struck by the significant differences between law schools and anthropology departments in how they assess scholarship and knowledge creation.  These differences create strong disincentives for collaboration, particularly pre-tenure.  Elena notes in her post that one of the drivers behind the workshop and the Collaborative Research Network on Human Rights (itself is an interdisciplinary project under the aegis of Law & Society) is the need to expand opportunities for collaboration across disciplines in empirical scholarship.  The workshop participants seemed in large agreement that empirical work needs to be understood beyond quantitative methods to include a variety of qualitative empirical methods. (Just when did “empirical” as currently used in the legal academy come to be a shorthand for quantitative analysis?)  But to what end?  Why do international lawyers do empirical scholarship?

At one point in the discussion, the question was raised why international legal scholarship has been slow to pick up on the legal realism/law & society scholarship trends of the 1970s — the “law in action” work which predated the dominance of law & economics.  In the human rights area, one answer is that the “law” as we understand it (i.e., the central treaties that make up the international human rights regime) did not come into force until the late 1970s; much of it did not come into force until the 80s and 90s.  There was simply not enough international legal behavior or data to observe, which is one reason the early discussions of the IHR system were largely normative (focused on what the content of those treaties should be) and theoretical (positing how IHR would or would not alter state behavior).  We now see more international legal scholarship that draws from social science disciplines and/or which engages in its own qualitative and quantitative empirical methods to illuminate what is actually happening “in the shadow of international law” — both within and between states and within and among non-state actors — and to explain what those empirical observations might tell us about normative assumptions and commitments and international law theory.  There is a lot of room for more and better find-grained analysis of the international legal system, which is in part what makes our field so exciting right now.

Kudos and thanks to Elena and her team for putting on a stimulating workshop!