Upcoming Talk on New Methods in International Law Link to heading

I’m excited to be speaking at the 2025 European Society of International Law (ESIL) Annual Conference! The conference is being held in Berlin (Germany) from 11 to 13 September 2025 under the general theme of “Reconstructing International Law”.

My talk is titled “The Chains of Pride: Reconstructing International Law as a Discipline of Fact and Principle” and will be part of Agora 8 on “Interdisciplinarity and the (Re)construction of International Law”.

The key message I want to get across is that we urgently need to enhance international law with new methods. This is not a call for interdisciplinarity, but for changing how the core of the discipline is taught and practiced under a serious reading of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). For example, the ordinary meaning is an empirical question of how language is used in practice and the interpretation of the object and purpose of a treaty pretends to be a normative exercise, but in truth it is a powerful demand to align select empirical causes with intended practical effects.

See the abstract below for more details.

Timetable Link to heading

Be sure to check out the conference website and conference program for more information.

Agora 8 will feature other great talks on social science and international law:

• Reconstructing International Treaty Law-Making with Behavioral Research (Professor Anne van Aaken, University of Hamburg, and Professor Tomer Broude, Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
• Insights from Interdisciplinary Research on Human Rights Treaties at the Subnational Level (Professor Evelyne Schmid, Université de Lausanne)

The Chains of Pride (Abstract) Link to heading

The autonomy of international law has always been a mirage. Power, empirical reality and fait accompli on the ground shape international law like no other legal field. Empirical facts are embedded in the very foundations of the system: from the effective control that makes or breaks a government to the political practice of States that creates international custom and influences the interpretation of treaties. International law may be the structured and principled application of power, but it is an application of power.

Even the traditional tools of the international lawyer are empirical at heart. The ordinary meaning in Article 31 (1) VCLT is an empirical question of how language is used in practice. The interpretation of the object and purpose of a treaty pretends to be a normative exercise, but in truth it is a powerful demand to align select empirical causes with intended practical effects.

The international legal discourse has done the world a disservice by discouraging the teaching of empirical methods and by insisting that international law is primarily a normative discipline. The rational creation and application of the law requires skill with both normative and empirical methods. In its pride, international legal scholarship has limited itself unnecessarily. Now is the time to rebuild the discipline.

I will show how three new datasets on the ICJ, PCIJ and UNSC help us push the boundaries of legal analysis. Natural language processing permits the symbiosis of close and distant reading (Moretti 2000). Statistical techniques help us see the forest among trees in international relations. Causal inference provides several convincing frameworks to rationally analyze and debate the practical impact of legal norms. Network analysis reveals not just citation habits, but a whole new world of relations in society.

We have nothing to lose but the chains of our pride.