Language Bias in International Legal Scholarship: Symptoms, Explanations, Implications and Remedies

Abstract

In her much-acclaimed book published in 2017, Anthea Roberts examines whether international law is indeed international. The answer to this question is 'no', one reason being the deep language biases that pervade international legal scholarship. One of the clearest symptoms of this distortion is the unprecedented dominance of English. While such a lingua franca has numerous advantages, it is connected to significant drawbacks. In this article, I first define what I mean by language bias in international legal scholarship before highlighting some of its symptoms. I then show that language bias is an underexplored topic in international legal scholarship and that this lack of engagement with the issue warrants further analysis. Next, I identify possible explanations for language bias, and I delineate its main implications for international legal scholarship and international law-making. Finally, I examine various strategies that can be pursued to minimize the negative consequences of language bias. While there are no easy answers, this article is a first attempt at highlighting the problematic effects of language bias on international legal scholarship, at outlining several strategies for tackling these effects and, importantly, at generating a scholarly debate on the dangers of language bias for the international, legal and scholarly character of our research.