William Hamilton Byrne

Project title

Legal Evolution in International Law (EVOLAW)

What is your project about?

EVOLAW explores how international law changes over time. Currently, we know how international law often changes through law-making process such as treaty making, but we know much less about how international law changes through shifts in legal interpretation. This is particularly the case in the law regulating the global movement of goods, persons, capital, and services, which are very much functionally integrated into human societies. EVOLAW works from this inroad to empirically examine how international law evolves across three case studies – European regional law, international aviation law, and national interpretations of international asylum law – and employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. 

How did you become interested in your particular field of research?

I have always been fascinated with the question of how international law changes over time because it is unlike how law changes in domestic law. This is because there is no centralized power for making law in the international arena, which means that international legal developments largely depend on a shared capacity for agreement between legal actors. However, there currently remain very few empirical analyses of how international law changes through this process. EVOLAW builds from the methods that I developed in my PhD research and expands them to research some new domains, where we currently lack a clear understanding of how international law changes.

What are the scientific challenges and perspectives in your project?

Examining legal evolution in international law requires one to adopt both a big picture and a more detailed approach, so that we can understand how international law changes between incremental and systemic change. With computational methods, we can now do this much more efficiently by examining large data sets of legal texts (e.g. case law). But we also need to be able to understand how international legal change works in its relationship with other aspects of change – i.e. the political, economic, and social causes. For this purpose, it is necessary to look at how change is justified by the diverse community of actors that always surrounds legal developments, for example, by policy makers, NGOs and academics.

What is your estimate of the impact, which your project may have to society in the long term?

EVOLAW primarily adopts an inductive mode of analysis that is intended to build a theory on how international law evolves. In showing how international law develops alongside changes in society, it intends to offer a clearer, and more empirical view on the relationship between international law and social change. From this, we can also get deeper insights on how we can use international law to promote social change, and vice versa, how social changes can be adequately regulated under international law.  

This can obviously support national policy initiatives, but it could also help actors such as NGOs who want to use the law to find the right moments."

Which impact do you expect the Sapere Aude programme will have on your career as a researcher?

I have been developing some leadership experience over the last few years and I am now at the stage of developing my own independent research agenda. EVOLAW enables this by developing my theoretical and methodological framework for understanding how international law evolves. This will in turn further provides the foundation for future research projects which will empirically and critically examine the fundamental entanglement between the mobility of goods, persons, capital, and services under international law. Watch this space!