International Legal Scholarship and the Challenge of Digitalization

Abstract

The paper argues that digitalization primarily presents a methodological challenge for international legal scholarship. Three developments are relevant in this context: The datafication of law, computerized information retrieval, and the differentiation of legal knowledge. International legal scholarship has benefited from treating legal texts, legal relationships as well as legal interactions and decision-making "as data". Typically, quantitative methods used on this data include text mining, network analysis, cluster analysis, and regression analysis. While data-driven scholarship cannot replace a hermeneutic approach to international law, it is likely to change the dimensionality of legal research, require adaptations of the law school curriculum, and enhance the interdisciplinary connectivity of international legal scholarship.