Resurrecting Compliance in Assessing Law’s Impact on Behavior
Thursday, February 6, 202012:00 PM - 1:30 PM (Pacific)
Encina Hall E409, Fourth Floor, East Wing, E409
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
Abstract:
Legal compliance has gotten a bad rap in international relations research. Compliance – the state of being on the “legal” side of a legal/illegal binary – has been largely set aside as a variable of interest in empirical studies of international law in favor of more substantive measures of behavioral change. Nevertheless, efforts to frame political science inquiry in terms of law’s effects have not succeeded in sidestepping compliance. To the contrary, none of the core functions of law (guiding behavior, assessing it, attributing responsibility, or assigning remedies) is possible without an applied concept of legal compliance as an orienting point on the horizon. This paper reclaims compliance as an essential concept for the empirical study of international law—albeit in a transformed state that emphasizes its potential for contextual variability and its essentially legal-political character.
Speaker Bio: