Resurrecting Compliance in Assessing Law's Impact on Behavior

• In Event: International Cooperation and International Law

Abstract

Legal compliance has gotten a bad rap in IR scholarship. Compliance - the state of being on the "legal" side of a legal/illegal binary - was often a sin qua non for demonstrating international legal effects early in the revival of IR interest in international law. It was later downgraded as a variable of interest among empirical scholars in favor of more substantive measures of behavioral change. Nevertheless, efforts to frame political science inquiry in terms of law's effects have not succeeded in sidestepping compliance altogether. To the contrary, none of the core functions of law (guiding behavior, assessing it, attributing responsibility, or assigning remedies) is possible without an applied concept of legal compliance as an orienting point on the horizon. This paper argues that much recent disenchantment stems from using compliance as an objectified technical-legal indicator. The focus is on reclaiming compliance as a necessary concept for the empirical study of international law-albeit in a transformed state that emphasizes its contextual variability and essentially political character. The argument is largely theoretic, though it draws upon empirical examples to illustrate key ideas about law and defining properties of legal process that underlie compliance as a legal and political concept.

Author

• Tonya L. Putnam, Columbia University