RESEARCH / BOOK · 2022– · ACTIVE
Figuring International Law
A book project on how figures of speech participate in the production of international legal argument, supported by large-scale computational analysis of international legal scholarship.
- 883
- EJIL book corpus
- 1990–2025
- Corpus span
- Book
- In progress
The argument
Figuring International Law examines how figurative language — metaphor, personification, narrative frames, and related figures — participates in the production of international legal argument. The claim is not that figures decorate doctrine, but that they help constitute what counts as a persuasive move.
The book combines close reading with computational study of scholarly corpora. Computational work is carried by FOSP, the research infrastructure built for this project.
Book status
Monograph in progress. A book proposal and sample chapters (approximately the first four chapters) are under review. Under review is not acceptance; no publisher is named until an offer or contract exists.
Corpus and method
Flagship work reads an EJIL article corpus (883 articles; span in the project stats) through the FOSP pipeline: detection, clustering, argument mapping, typology, classification, and analytics. Close reading and computational reconstruction run in parallel.
Public technical detail lives on the FOSP page as it becomes releasable.
Manuscripts
Finished submitted manuscripts linked to this project appear under Publications when they meet the listing rules. Incomplete drafts stay on this project (Workbench / in_progress) until finished and citable.