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What is the role of international law in foreign-policy decision-making? In particular, why do leaders justify policy decisions with appeals to international law and why do these appeals make the references that they do? This paper combines scholarship on the role of justifications and the permissive power of international law, theorizing that decisionmakers will seek out international legal justifications over justifications that reference non-legal claims. These justifications are seen as particularly important in the contemporary world, reflecting the legalized nature of international relations today. In particular, decision-makers will especially prefer to reference codified international agreements over customary international law, seeing a particular value to referencing a written text even if it is not as directly connected to the issue at hand. These more general justifications are, in turn, preferred over non-legal justifications. This reflects the importance of international law in international relations—in a deeply legalized system actors feel compelled to portray their behaviors as legal, even if these justifications are tenuous or if pursuing them is time and resource consuming. The United Kingdom's 1956 intervention in the Suez and the United States' 1983 intervention in Grenada—are used to test these assumptions. Both cases support the theory: decision-makers prefer legal justifications, pursuing these over other options. In addition, decision-makers appear to prefer legal arguments built on codified law, keeping with the theoretical predictions. These findings deepen our understanding of how actors understand and use international law, its role in justifications, and the legalized nature of international relations today.

What is the role of rhetoric and argumentation in international relations? Some argue that it is little more than 'cheap talk', while others say that it may play a role in persuasion or coordination. However, why states deploy certain arguments, and why these arguments succeed or fail, is less well understood. I argue that, in international negotiations, certain types of legal frames are particularly useful for creating winning arguments. When a state bases its arguments on constitutive legal claims, opponents are more likely to become trapped by the law: unable to develop sustainable rebuttals or advance their preferred policy. To evaluate this theory, I apply qualitative discourse analysis to the US arguments on the crime of aggression at the Kampala Review Conference of the International Criminal Court – where the US advanced numerous arguments intended to reshape the crime to align with US interests. The analysis supports the theoretical propositions – arguments framed on codified legal grounds had greater success, while arguments framed on more political grounds were less sustainable, failing to achieve the desired outcomes. These findings further develop our understanding of the use of international law in rhetoric, argumentation, and negotiation.