Military Lawyers on the Battlefield: An Empirical Account of International Law Compliance

Abstract

International law scholarship remains locked in a raging debate about the extent to which states do or do not comply with international legal norms. For years, this debate lacked empirical data altogether. International law advocates tended to assume that most nations obey most laws most of the time and proceeded to measure state activity against international norms through conventional legal analysis. In contrast, international relations realists and rational choice theorists have argued that international law is simply an epiphenomenon of other state interests with little independent power at all. Meanwhile, constructivist and transnational legal process approaches have posited that international law seeps into state behavior through psychological and sociological mechanisms of norm internalization and strategic action. But even these studies tend to remain on a theoretical level, without on-the-ground data about which factors might influence compliance in actual day-to-day settings.