Public International Law and Economics Symposium Introduction

It is a commonplace that we live in an era of increasing international interdependence, in which there has been a proliferation of international law and international organizations. Yet our understanding of the workings of international law has not kept pace. While we have a good deal of work on international law doctrine, our analytic tools are much weaker, and we are far from anything approaching a science of institutional design. We are therefore ill prepared to advise policy makers in the project of developing effective tools to solve transna-tional problems, and to provide global public goods. The contributions to this special issue, though they involve a wide range of different approaches and topics, share a commitment to using the core methodological assumptions of the rational choice approach in seeking to answer important question in International Law. The papers published in this issue were first presented at a conference at the Max-Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany in December 2006. In putting together the conference, we had two aims, one interdisciplinary and one intercultural. We wanted to contribute to the nascent law and economics of public international law. We noticed, however, that the use of the rational choice approach to international law has been largely confined to the United States, creating a methodological gap between European and American international law scholarship. We sought to generate a trans-Atlantic discussion not only about the substantive papers but on the appropriateness of the rational choice approach to international law