Lawyering compliance with international law: Legal advisers in the ‘War on Terror’
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract According to rationalists and constructivists, compliance with international law occurs to the extent that states see non-compliance as unreasonable or wrong, respectively. An alternative account of compliance points to the practical difficulty of deciding to act contrary to international law. Here non-compliance is blocked rather than morally or instrumentally deterred. This article advances an organisational-process theory of this third kind. The explanatory mechanism lies in the constitutive rules of foreign policymaking, and points to the institutional function of legal advising. Under certain structural conditions (namely, lawyerised decision-making) legal advisers operate as the principal ‘agents of compliance’ within the state, bringing international law into the policymaking process and thus bridging the gap between foreign policy and legal expectations. The theory is applied to the interrogation programme implemented by the United States in the early years of the ‘War on Terror’ (2001–5). While initially violative of international legal standards, the programme eventually shifted towards compliance. Using process tracing, the case study provides fine-grained evidence that corroborates the explanatory power of organisational factors, in general, and legal advising, in particular.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 it