International Law and Constructivism: Elements of an International Theory of International Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By linking the interactional legal theory of Lon L. Fuller to the insights of recent constructivist literature in international relations (IR) theory, this article posits a distinctive explanation of the binding force of international law and begins to trace out an explanation of law’s persuasive power in international society. The authors challenge the dominant positivist explanations of law in international legal theory, and show how those explanations have been borrowed uncritically even by many of those international relations scholars who have paid particular attention to the role of norms in world politics. Arguing that law is most persuasive when it is created through processes of mutual construction by a wide range of participants in a legal system, the authors focus upon a particular understanding of legal legitimacy, rooted in adherence to internal morality and specificity of legal rationality, a specificity generated in large measure by rhetorical processes. The article concludes with suggestions for a shared research agenda for international lawyers and constructivist IR scholars.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".