International Legal Profession

In my last post, I noted several gaps in the literature on legal persuasion, notably the reasons actors make legal arguments, the forms those arguments take, and their effectiveness.  In this post, I want to express a few views on the first two of these questions, based on research that reflects my experience in-house at several international institutions whose mission includes encouraging compliance with international norms.  In brief,  I’ve tried to develop a theory under which an international actor (government, NGO, non-state actor, corporation, etc.) seeking to persuade another actor to comply makes decisions about the sort of strategy it will use based on four inputs: Ÿ the nature of the compliance dispute; Ÿ the parties to the dispute; Ÿ the institutional setting for the persuasive process; and Ÿ the traits and sense of identity of the persuading entity. These inputs will affect all aspects of its persuasive strategy -- the timing of the intervention (i.e., the ripeness issue), the specific institutional players it will deploy (e.g., high vs. low-level actors),…