Toward a Sociology of International Law: John Hagan and Beyond

Abstract

Socio-legal scholars these days devote themselves routinely to the study of international law. It was not always thus. In the late twentieth century, no more than a handful of law-and-society scholars asked themselves how international law worked. Even fewer ventured into the field. John Hagan was one of those who did and the first sociologist to study empirically - and rigorously - what we now call international criminal law. In this article, I use Hagan's oeuvre to reflect on the intellectual history of international legal scholarship in the twenty-first century. I argue that Hagan brought three things to the study of international law: criminology, methodology, and ideology. I trace each of these contributions in detail, assess their intellectual import, and relate them to alternative ways of seeing international law. The story I tell is of a pioneering scholar who charted an empirical path toward the sociology of international law, but whose moral compass - acquired during his socialization in the Vietnam era - also occasionally blinded him to the dark sides of virtue.