All areas of international humanitarian law. Specific themes: the interaction between international humanitarian law and human rights during armed conflict and occupation; targeted killings; Use of drones and autonomous weapons systems. Third, it is acceptable to start with a somewhat general or vague research question and narrow and refine it. For example, let`s say you start with “if the duty to take precautions under IHL requires risking the lives of soldiers.” As you read, you will notice that there are several different precautions under IHL. Depending on the scope of your research, you may want to refine your question as follows: “Should the duty to warn civilians in advance require exposing soldiers to potential danger?” In other words, it`s perfectly acceptable to make adjustments to your question as you go. Judicial decisions are important primary sources in international legal research as in all legal research. However, unlike national courts, the terrain of international tribunals is highly fragmented. [33] As you probably know by now, there is no “Supreme Court of the International Community” to which all other courts are subordinate. Most courts are limited in their jurisdiction to a particular matter or to a specific group of States or individuals. To make matters worse, national courts often rule on issues of international law or refer to international law in their decisions.

A crucial point in conducting your research is whether there is an international tribunal that might have jurisdiction over the issues related to your question, and whether these issues have been dealt with substantially by national courts. After all, nowadays it`s important not to neglect social media. For better or worse, states and other international actors often share positions (and, uh, insults) on Twitter. [36] These may also be relevant to your search. Second, a research question must be tailored to the scope of your work, or in other words, it must be one that you can reasonably answer in the space available to you. Most session papers are about 10,000 words, including footnotes. This length corresponds to a question such as “Should the duty to take precautions under IHL require risking soldiers` lives?”, but probably not “the legal history of proxy wars during the Cold War”. The unfortunate nature of seminars is that you usually have very little time to think about a research question, and since you`re new to the field, you`d probably struggle to determine if your question fits the scope of your work.

Most instructors (I hope) would like to let you know if your question is too broad. Nevertheless, some publications and other databases bring together important parts of practice (mainly governmental). For example, each issue of the American Journal of International Law contains a section on contemporary United States practice in the field of international law. The U.S. Department of State prepares an annual summary of U.S. government practices, which is available here. German practice in international law can be found here. Further research on government practice is listed in the library of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.

All areas of international law. research proposals in the field of international liability; international organizations; contract law; international law and the use of force; international law and terrorism; The sovereign immunity of States and the immunity of international organizations were particularly welcome. Normative theories can also be utilitarian. The best-known example of such thinking is, of course, law and economics. [14] Another family of instrumental normative theories can be roughly described as political approaches to international law. In the simplest sense, policy approaches ask what the law should be in terms of the ability to produce good political consequences. The New Haven School of International Law, for example, has analyzed international law from the perspective of a global standard of human dignity. [15] It is safe to say that almost all current research on international law, particularly in the United States, uses policy approaches, but not explicitly.

[16] In summary, when formulating normative research questions, we must be aware that at some point we will have to set ourselves on a standard against which we can measure our normative conclusions.