International Legal Compliance: Surveying the Field

Abstract

Does international law matter, or is it but a fairy ship upon a fairy sea: a beautiful construct of the legal imagination floating upon a sea of false assumptions? International legal compliance (ILC), the newest and most rapidly developing subfield in international law, was born in the early 1990s from the revived debate between legalization theorists, a group committed to the belief that the transformations wrought by the end of the Cold War have rendered international law independently capable of constraining and shaping the behavior of states, and their critics, a camp committed to the contrary notion that international law remains primarily an aspirational enterprise subordinate to politics and epiphenomenal to state practice. In attempting to prevail on the question of the efficacy of international law, legalists and skeptics alike have set about propounding and testing an array of interrelated theories, and in the process the questions of whether, and if so, why and under what circumstances states elect to comply with international law have emerged as the most central and pressing issues within the international legal academy. Building upon the insights of international relations theory and the methodologies of the social sciences, the field of ILC has organized around competing answers to these meta-questions, and the body of ILC scholarship now consists of more then ten books and over one hundred articles.

International Legal Compliance: Surveying the Discipline, lists and annotates the major entries within the ILC corpus. For each entry a brief summary, together with one or more numbers corresponding to a list of major ILC themes, is provided. Although it is intended to be complete and comprehensive, the Bibliography does not list every article that could arguably be included within the ILC corpus. Short articles duplicative of the previous work of scholars have been omitted, as have articles that are tangentially connected to ILC or are largely descriptive, rather than analytical. Although the majority of ILC scholars are legal academics, an effort has been made to include the works of authors in related fields such as international relations and economics.

The methodology is as follows. A search of Westlaw, Lexis, and Worldcat was conducted to identify every potential book and article in the field of ILC. Each source was then read to ensure that it fit within the field. Additional articles cited or discussed by the authors of each source were noted for possible inclusion. A preliminary draft of this Article was sent to each author for comments, corrections, and suggestions for additional authors and sources (I have appended their comments infra).

To be included in the bibliography, each source was required to address one or more themes that constitute the field of ILC. These themes, along with the number and letter scheme employed to denote them, are as follows: 1. General theory, 2. Empirical analysis, 3. Skepticism, 4. Critical perspectives, 5. Relationship to domestic law and institutions, 6. High/Low Politics, 7. Literature Survey, 8. Human Agency, 9. Methodological and Epistemological Issues, and 10. Effectiveness.

Keywords: International law, international relations theory, compliance, international economic law, laws of war, human rights law