The Computational Analysis of International Law

Abstract

When traditional international law techniques reach their conceptual and methodological limits, we need to look for help in other disciplines. International law scholars have in the past drawn inspirations from economics, political science or sociology to enrich the study and our understanding of international law. Now the time has come to add a new discipline to this list: computer science. The computational analysis of international law renders legal analysis scalable and empowers international lawyers to study international law in unprecedented depth and breadth. In this contribution, I provide an overview of computational techniques for the doctrinal and legal-institutional study of international law highlighting this neglected, but increasingly important field of interdisciplinary study.

Keywords: International law, computer science, data science, network analysis, natural language processing, machine learning