The Institute for International, Comparative and Area Studies presents Mark Pollack, professor, political science, Temple University.

“What Can International Relations Learn from International Law?"

Social Sciences Building (SSB), Room 107.

The emerging field of international law and international relations (IL/IR) is nominally interdisciplinary, but the intellectual terms of trade have been one-sided, consisting largely of the application of IR as a discipline to IL as a subject. IR scholars generally view IL scholarship as naïvely formalist and methodologically suspect, and have largely ignored it. Ironically, in doing so IR scholars often embrace a type of unwitting formalism that narrowly equates international law with the black-letter rules of treaties, interpretation with the rulings of international courts, and impact with formal compliance with ratified treaties.

This paper attempts to “reverse field,” exploring what IR scholars can learn from IL scholarship. We offer a brief primer on leading IL theories, demonstrating that the image of IL scholarship as formalistic and blind to political realities is obsolete. We then identify how international legal writings can advance IR thinking with respect to law-making (more fine-grained theories of design, greater attention to customary law), interpretation (examining interpretive strategies, as well as interpretation outside of courts), and application (a focus on the uses of indeterminate laws by political actors, and the impact of law “beyond compliance”).

Mark A. Pollack is professor of political science and law and Jean Monnet Chair ad personam at Temple University, where he conducts research on the interactions of international law and international relations, with a particular emphasis on the European Union. He has published widely on these subjects, including most recently Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations: The State of the Art (co-edited with Jeffrey L. Dunoff, Cambridge University Press, 2013). His current research includes a research project (with Dunoff) on international judicial dissent, as well as a book project on the United States’ ambivalent support for international law.

Info: [email protected].