The Consortium for Study and Analysis of International Law Scholarship (SAILS) is a group of international and comparative law faculty and librarians that work on exploring the field of international and comparative law.  SAILS participants are committed to examining how international law journals have influenced the ways in which both scholars and practitioners inside and outside of the field think about international law. 

Many legal scholars, and some practitioners, treat international law as exceptional among doctrines and canons, and some even suggest that international law is not properly law. In the United States, and to some degree elsewhere, international law scholarship is likewise set apart from domestic law scholarship, reinforcing this bifurcation and international law exceptionalism, likely to the detriment of both fields. Little work has been done to analyze how international, comparative, and foreign relations law research and publications are influencing the practice of international law, and even less has been done with special attention to what areas, regions, and individuals are left out.

The impact of SAILS has been to inform publication bodies and scholars across the legal community as to the gaps in our scholarship, unanticipated repercussions of our publishing practices, and areas for engagement with domestic law scholars to promote international law as law, as well as to create pathways for further legal development within international law. The work commissioned by SAILS examines and analyzes how international, comparative, and foreign relations law journals, and other publications, have shaped the practice and teaching of international law.

Some SAILS projects have sought to address the following:

• what topics are covered by international law scholarship, and what topics are left out;
• the geographic and educational backgrounds of authors, and communities that may be missing;
• reliance on international law publications by the practice community, or lack thereof;
• the appearance or absence of international law in mainstream law journals;
• the place of language, and emphasis on English in international law scholarship, especially with respect to accessibility to the non-English-speaking world;
• new developments in technology influencing international law research;
• the impact of professional networks on publication trends and citations;
• disparities in gender and race in international law scholarship;
• the history of international law journals – peer-reviewed and student-edited;
• how research funding has an impact on what gets published, read, and cited;
• the rise and/or fall of comparative law scholarship and its significance;
• access to research and scholarly databases within the developing world;
• the intersections between international law, international relations, and political science, among other social science sibling fields; and,
• the prevalence or deficiency of interdisciplinary research networks and professional gatherings.

For more information about SAILS, please contact the SAILS administrative team at sails@georgetown.edu.

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