Tracing influence in international legal studies: Beyond the antagonism between doctrine of law and social science

This chapter argues that the insights from process-tracing elucidates and why it can remedy methodological weaknesses of current international legal scholarship. First, this chapter explains why and how the most of existing studies stop short of elaborating on the mechanism that links the causal elements and the consequence (1). Then, it moves on to explain the insights that is given from the process-tracing, and how it can help international legal scholarship to overcome the weakness in identifying the influence in international law (2). Lastly, it ends by a few remarks on the future of legal studies, particularly, in the light of common ground to determine what makes for a valid legal argument, suggesting a path to move beyond ontological contestation between legal orthodoxy and social science. (3)