1 In their Lead Essay for the 2021 Chicago Journal of International Law Symposium, Daniel Abebe, Adam Chilton, and Tom Ginsburg 2 offer an account of “the rise of the social science approach to international law, explain the basics of the method, and advocate for its continued adoption.” 3 They advocate for an approach with the goal of accounting for “how international law works in practice.” 4 This Essay builds on their analysis and focuses on international economic law (IEL) 5 as a subfield of international law.

The growing attention to embedding empirical and theoretical analyses into legal scholarly work has raised concerns about whether legal scholars could borrow methods from social science research, adopting an interdisciplinary approach. It argues that, by conceptualizing IEL in Africa as a social phenomenon, socio-legal approaches open IEL in Africa to the application of other social science methods, which enables us to understand the context in which African regional trade agreements are implemented and their contribution to the scholarly field of IEL.

It illustrates the empirical method’s importance in understanding one of the most challenging aspects of the study of IEL in Africa: capturing the data and dynamism of informal cross-border trade phenomenon. In their Lead Essay for the 2021 Chicago Journal of International Law Symposium, Daniel Abebe, Adam Chilton, and Tom Ginsburg offer an account of “the rise of the social science approach to international law, explain the basics of the method, and advocate for its continued adoption.” This Essay critically assesses how and why one might use socio-legally inspired methods (analytical, empirical, and normative) for the study of international economic law ( IEL) in Africa.

Reflections on a brave new world pdf