What 'If'? The Emerging Epistemic Community of International Criminal Justice
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What 'If'? The Emerging Epistemic Community of International Criminal Justice. / Holtermann, Jakob v. H.; Kjær, Anne Lise.
I: European Journal of Legal Studies, Bind 2019, Nr. Special Issue, 01.2019, s. 49-90.Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskrift › Tidsskriftartikel › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
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TY - JOUR
T1 - What 'If'?
T2 - The Emerging Epistemic Community of International Criminal Justice
AU - Holtermann, Jakob v. H.
AU - Kjær, Anne Lise
PY - 2019/1
Y1 - 2019/1
N2 - Using international criminal law as a case study, this article aims to demonstrate how computer driven corpus linguistics combined with philosophy of law and sociology of science can help improve our understanding of legal knowledge and science. The article is built on a computer driven corpus linguistic study of all judgments from the ICTY and the ICTR from 1996-2017. To our surprise, this study revealed that the frequency of the use of ifs in all judgements had exhibited an almost perfectly steady annual decline – from 93 per 100,000 words on average in 1996 to 34 in 2017. As a linguistic phenomenon, this cuts against how we would expect language to behave. In the search for an explanation, we move from linguistics into the philosophical and sociological study of (legal) knowledge and science. In the most general terms, the explanation ties the disappearing of ifs to the emergence of international criminal law as a distinct specialized legal science, a separate sub-discipline constituted by a professionally shared corpus of knowledge – or of “a substantial body of jurisprudence on genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, as well as forms of individual and superior responsibility”, as the ICTR put it when closing down.
AB - Using international criminal law as a case study, this article aims to demonstrate how computer driven corpus linguistics combined with philosophy of law and sociology of science can help improve our understanding of legal knowledge and science. The article is built on a computer driven corpus linguistic study of all judgments from the ICTY and the ICTR from 1996-2017. To our surprise, this study revealed that the frequency of the use of ifs in all judgements had exhibited an almost perfectly steady annual decline – from 93 per 100,000 words on average in 1996 to 34 in 2017. As a linguistic phenomenon, this cuts against how we would expect language to behave. In the search for an explanation, we move from linguistics into the philosophical and sociological study of (legal) knowledge and science. In the most general terms, the explanation ties the disappearing of ifs to the emergence of international criminal law as a distinct specialized legal science, a separate sub-discipline constituted by a professionally shared corpus of knowledge – or of “a substantial body of jurisprudence on genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, as well as forms of individual and superior responsibility”, as the ICTR put it when closing down.
KW - Faculty of Law
KW - international criminal law
KW - corpus linguistics
KW - epistemic communities
KW - tacit knowledge
KW - paradigm
KW - doxa
KW - Thomas Kuhn
KW - Hans Kelsen
KW - Joseph Raz
KW - Ronald Dworkin
KW - Pierre Bourdieu
UR - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3297585
M3 - Journal article
VL - 2019
SP - 49
EP - 90
JO - European Journal of Legal Studies
JF - European Journal of Legal Studies
SN - 1973-2937
IS - Special Issue
ER -
ID: 212848026