International Legal Research in a Global Community

While treaties and international custom are the bedrock of public international legal research, other sources, including general principles of law, tribunal decisions, the writings of highly qualified scholars, jus cogens, UN resolutions, and soft law, must all be consulted for comprehensive research. International Legal Research in a Global Community offers researchers confronted with legal issues that implicate public international law a foundation in these sources of law, research strategies for handling them, and real-world examples that focus on the process for carrying out research.

This book further refines the research approach for handling treaties and international custom based on the recent tentative drafts of the Restatement of the Law (Fourth) Foreign Relations of the United States and the 2016 Annual Report of the International Law Commission. With a chapter on cultural competency, and written from a US perspective, this book identifies areas where biases and blind spots may arise when researching and applying international law so that researchers may account for them.

This book is part of the International Legal Research Series, edited by Mark E. Wojcik, The John Marshall Law School.