The Blind Men and the Elephant: An Empirical Analysis of the Social Sciences in International Law

What is the role of the social sciences in international legal scholarship? This article maps how international legal scholarship has interacted with the social sciences across time. It first sets a taxonomy on how such interactions could be considered from the perspective of substance, findings, methods, and epistemologies, and then turns to map the use of social science in six renowned international law journals by using a corpus linguistic approach that encompasses more than 15,000 documents from 1907 to 2022. We conclude with critical reflections on what could be encouraging a turn to social sciences, through an analysis of patterns of university institutionalization, coupled with new data on funding of certain strands of social science-inspired international law scholarship in Europe, Germany, and Australia.