Guest Editorial Note: Selected Essays from the Study and Analysis of International Law (SAILS) Consortium

The relationship between scholarship and practice in international law is unusually porous, yet still poorly understood.  Scholarship not only informs practice – frequently being cited in international legal texts and itself constituting a secondary source of law – but is likewise shaped by the demands and experiences of practice. International law scholars routinely serve as judges, drafters, and lawmakers in ways rarely seen in other legal fields, further blurring the line.  Moreover, scholars and practitioners alike continue to produce a vast array of research, but comparatively few have systematically examined the structures and processes through which international law knowledge is generated, disseminated, and translated into practice. We lack a systematic understanding of how ideas move from the academic page to the policy memo, treaty text, or judicial opinion, and back.

Recognizing this shortcoming, the Consortium for the Study and Analysis of International Law Scholarship (SAILS) was established by a group of international and comparative law faculty and librarians to explore the intellectual, institutional and practical dimensions of international law as a discipline. SAILS brings together doctrinal, clinical and library faculty from around the world to investigate how international legal knowledge is produced and how it influences law and policy. The project examines the relationships among theory, research and practice – seeking to understand how scholarly trends interact with the political and normative challenges of the 21st century.

In their work, SAILS participants address a shared set of questions: What are the dominant themes in international law scholarship today? How do publishing practices shape what counts as knowledge? Which regions, institutions or voices remain underrepresented? What links exist between scholarly production and the operation of international law in practice? By tackling these issues, SAILS essays not only map the contours of the field of international law but also point to ways of making the field more empirically grounded, globally inclusive and methodologically diverse.

Two of those works are now part of this special series appearing in these pages in The Theatre of International Law. In issue 36-3, Lianne Boer examines the international legal ‘commentary’ as a distinctive scholarly form, arguing that its material and aesthetic qualities – its weight, typography and monumental presentation – reflect and reproduce the authority of international law itself.  Boer maintains that these physical features profoundly shape how international lawyers experience and understand the authority of law. Through detailed reflections on the weight, size, typography, layout and sensory feel of printed commentaries, she shows how these objects produce a sense of gravitas, coherence and reverence that is central to the discipline’s self-conception, in contrast to the disorienting fluidity and loss of material presence in digital versions. By comparing contemporary commentaries with medieval glosses and analysing how print and digital formats differently structure reading practices, Boer contends that the transition online of these materials diminishes the embodied, affective and hierarchical cues that anchor scholarly engagement with international law. The essay ultimately argues that commentaries are not merely repositories of legal meaning but objects that actively construct how international lawyers relate to their field – intellectually, materially and emotionally.

In this issue 36-4, Damien Charlotin and Michael Waibel use computational text analysis to study a century of the Hague Academy’s Collected Courses, revealing how this flagship publication mirrors the evolution – and limits – of international law’s universalist aspirations. Charlotin and Waibel show that the Academy – founded in 1923 as a Western, Carnegie-funded institution – has remained heavily dominated by WEOG (Western European and Others Group) scholars, with persistent underrepresentation of women and of lecturers from Asia, Africa and Latin America, even as the global student body has diversified. Their analysis documents major shifts in the Academy’s intellectual output, including the transition from French to English, the dramatic expansion in course length after the rise of word-processing technologies, and the waxing and waning of topics such as the law of the sea, international monetary law, socialist conceptions of international law, and international humanitarian law. The citation network reveals strong internal coherence within subfields but little cross-fertilization between public and private international law, and a reinforcing centrality of generalist courses and WEOG-based institutions. Overall, the article shows how the Academy’s structures, personnel and pedagogical choices have shaped the construction of authority in international law. It also lays the empirical groundwork for future research on representation, expertise and the global dynamics of the discipline.

SAILS similarly situates itself within a growing recognition that international law’s intellectual life cannot be separated from its institutional contexts. Beyond generating new scholarship, the SAILS Consortium serves as a long-term infrastructure for the study of the field itself. For instance, the Consortium’s website hosts qualitative and quantitative research on the production and dissemination of international law scholarship, providing a central hub for scholars, practitioners and students interested in these questions.

The project’s broader ambition is to foster critical self-awareness within the discipline. In an era when core principles of international law face renewed political contestation, understanding how knowledge is created and circulated becomes urgent. Those who shape the discourse – through publications, teaching or practice – inevitably influence the law’s development and its legitimacy, and these two essays are illustrative of that fact. By illuminating these general dynamics, SAILS invites international lawyers to reflect not only on the content of their arguments but also on the institutional and intellectual frameworks that sustain them.