Introduction to Symposium on Pierre-Hugues Verdier and Erik Voeten, “Precedent, Compliance, and Change in Customary International Law: An Explanatory Theory”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AJIL Unbound is pleased to announce three commentators who will discuss the article by Pierre-Hugues Verdier and Erik Voeten entitled “Precedent, Compliance, and Change in Customary International Law: An Explanatory Theory.” The article argues that rational choice scholars have overlooked key characteristics of customary international law and that those characteristics undermine the enforcement of customary norms through decentralized punishment. Instead, Verdier and Voeten contend, states may comply with customary international law even if their short-term interests are to defect, because states know that their decision to defect generates precedent that undermines the norm as a whole. Our commentators on this article are, first, Professor Tim Meyer, from the University of Georgia, who maintains that Verdier and Voeten overstate the distinction between custom and treaties. Second, Professor Jens David Ohlin, from Cornell, asks what happens to custom when states cannot appeal to long-term interests. He argues that compliance in these “one-shot” scenarios can be understood partly by considering the formation of plans by states which may act rationally in carrying through on their obligations without re-evaluating their plans. Finally, Professor Alejandro Lorite Escorihuela, from the University of Quebec at Montreal, argues that the role of precedent is clear from both the doctrine and practice of customary international law, so that it is unclear what rational choice methodology is adding to our understanding of custom, a critique he buttresses in part through an examination of some of the examples discussed in the article.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.032 | 0.009 |
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".