Abstract
INTRODUCTION: On April 24, 2025, the International Law and Social Science Interest Group debuted at the ASIL Annual Meeting with a panel that posed a deceptively simple question: how can social science tools advance the work of international lawyers? Chaired by Chantal Thomas, the session brought together Matthew Erie, Wolfgang Alschner, Beth Simmons, and Katerina Linos— scholars who bridge doctrinal and empirical inquiry—to show how ethnography, computational text analysis, counterfactual inference, and mixed-method design can illuminate legal puzzles that doctrine alone cannot solve. The four short essays in this symposium provide parallel illustrations of this core theme: Erie’s ethnographic approach uncovers the narratives states tell, Alschner’s algorithms “read” treaty texts at scale, Simmons’s causal tests probe law’s real-world effects, and Linos’s hybrid design braids quantitative and qualitative evidence. Collectively they demonstrate that what may seem arcane is in fact accessible: a rich toolkit of social-science methods ready to answer some of international law’s most pressing questions.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1017/amp.2025.10066
External Links
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-asil-annual-meeting/article/seeing-beyond-the-words-what-interdisciplinary-methodologies-reveal-about-international-law/B89696736ACBF252A098C7B7E07E0C1D#article
Repository Citation
Matthew S. Erie, Mark Pollack, Wolfgang Alschner, Beth Simmons & Katerina Linos,
Seeing Beyond the Words: What Interdisciplinary Methodologies Reveal About International Law,
119
Procs. ASIL Ann. Meeting
73
(2026).
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/2357
Included in
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