Lunch seminar with Kilian Lüders
The Geography of International Law discourse
Where is research on international law (IL) produced? Which institutions shape and receive disproportionate attention in the IL discourse? And to what extent is this discourse Anglocentric?
This presentation reports on ongoing empirical research into the global geography of the international law discourse, drawing on publication data from the SCOPUS literature database. Author affiliation data serve as the central analytical lens, enabling the identification of attention asymmetries and geographic disparities in IL scholarship. The talk will first present descriptive findings that map and explain the spatial mechanisms underlying these asymmetries. It will then explore how geographic context shapes perspectives on international law, engaging with a more experimental research design.
Speaker bio
Kilian Lüders is a social scientist currently based at the Faculty of Law at the University of Regensburg in Germany. In his research, he uses empirical methods, particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, to study courts and legal institutions, with particular focus on legal reasoning. Through this work, he aims to bridge the gap between the social sciences' interest in the influence of legal institutions and legal scholarship's focus on legal argumentation. His PhD at Humboldt University Berlin examines how the German Federal Constitutional Court invokes balancing and the proportionality test in its case law.
During his time at iCourts, he will work on a new project examining academic discourse in international law, paying particular attention to geographical disparities in the debate. He is also interested in discussing the methodological paradigms and challenges associated with empirical research on law and courts.