scholarly journals THE “ENGLISH SCHOOL” OF INTERNATIONAL LAW: SOUNDINGS VIA THE 1972 JUBILEE ESSAYS

2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (S1) ◽  
pp. S126-S153
Author(s):  
Surabhi Ranganathan
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Law Of The Sea ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
English School ◽  
The Future ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Anniversary Issue ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law

AbstractAs part of the Cambridge Law Journal's centenary celebrations, this article reads two essays from the journal's 50th anniversary issue. The essays, by Cambridge professors Robert Jennings and Derek Bowett offer resources for the history of international law and its historiography. They shine a light on key debates on the law of the sea at a crucial moment of its development. A close reading of these essays also reveals starting points for new scrutiny of an “English” tradition of international law, including the place of the academy within the tradition, its blueprints for the future of international law and international legal order, and its relation to empire and capitalism.

Contingencies in International Legal Histories

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-128
Author(s):  
Filipe dos Reis
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Different Origins

This chapter reconstructs how contingency is situated in international legal histories. In particular, it focuses on how contingency relates to narratives of international law’s origin and progress. It explores, first, how traditional and recent international legal histories locate the origin of international law. Different authors—advancing different projects—situate international law within a range of different origins. In the end, the origin of international law is contingent. Moreover, it is possible for some authors, particularly those problematising international law’s Eurocentric origin, to conceptualise the link of contingency and origin not only as the contingency of origin but also in the form of a contingency as origin of international law, as international law originates from the confrontations, translations, encounters, and struggles of various actors. The chapter analyses, second, arguments about progress in international legal histories and argues that these arguments are tied to different conceptualisations of the observer, i.e. the international legal historian. Here, more traditional international legal histories often rely on an understanding of a non-contingent observer, who seeks to create an international legal order that is able to tame the contingencies of the international sphere. However, such narratives of international law’s linear progress have come under scrutiny recently as several interventions started to direct our attention to the multiple perspectives and multilinear trajectories in the making of the current international legal order or invite us to conceptualise the history of international law as a sequence of contingent disruptive events. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of what it could mean to open international legal histories for different conceptualisations of origin and to give up the idea of a non-contingent observer inscribed in progressive narratives.

International Legal Histories as Orders: An Afterword to Martti Koskenniemi’s Foreword

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 1115-1119
Author(s):  
Francesca Iurlaro
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
The Many

Abstract In this article I address the question of what Martti Koskenniemi refers to in his EJIL Foreword as Hugo Grotius’ legal imagination – the type of values he was trying to convey and the strategies he meant to pursue while constructing his idea of an international legal order. As a matter of fact, focusing on such an apparently narrow aspect is not just relevant to those with a historical interest in Grotius. It also tells us something about the inveterate relationship between international law and historiographic practices. What I want to suggest here is that the history of international law is not just an a posteriori critical reflection on the international legal order – a subgenre for lovers of intellectual escapism in search of a distraction from the many problems of the contemporary world – but, rather, that one of the many successful projects of international law was (and still is) the ambition to order the world through histories.

New Approaches to the History of International Law

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 555-566 ◽  
Author(s):  
UPENDRA BAXI
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law

Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 0521828929, 356 pp., £60.00 (hb).Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, ISBN 0521827612, 414 pp., £65.00 (hb).

The International Law of the Future

1944 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 354-369
Author(s):  
Josef L. Kunz
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Atlantic City ◽  
The Future ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Small Committee ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
The Individual

On February 28, 1942, a conference at Atlantic City was arranged by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to inaugurate discussions on the international law of the future. Since that time, a series of group conferences and smaller meetings have been held in various centers of the United States and Canada, at which nearly 200 men, chiefly Americans and Canadians, participated—judges, lawyers, professors, governmental officers, and men of special international experience. To assure continuity, a few persons—outstanding among them Judge Manley O. Hudson of the Harvard Law School and Professor P. E. Corbett of McGill University—were present at all the meetings, and a small committee prepared the different drafts.The aim of these informal conferences, held over a period of nearly two years, was to arrive at a community of views; and this was achieved when a Statement, growing out of successive drafts, was subscribed to by some 150 of the persons who had participated in the discussions. This document, hitherto strictly confidential, has now been released for publication. Its contents are not to be taken, either in whole or in part, to represent the individual views of any particular person who participated in the discussions.The Statement consists of six Postulates, ten Principles, and twenty-three Proposals, each explained by comment in the light of the history of international law over a period of a hundred years. The Postulates set forth the essential premises, the basic conceptions, of an effective international legal order. The Principles—so to speak, the heart of the Statement —are offered as a draft of a declaration which might be officially promulgated by the statesmen who will build the future peace. The Proposals are indications, suggestions for implementing the Principles, but are not presented as draft provisions for inclusion in an international instrument.It is the object of the present article to summarize and comment upon the Statement's principal features.

scholarly journals The Territorial Temptation: A Siren Song at Sea

2006 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 830-851 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard H. Oxman
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Law Of The Sea ◽  
Territorial State ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
Unrestricted Access ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Significant Measure ◽  
Rational Conclusion

La mer a toujours ete battue par deux grands vents contraires: le vent du large, qui souffle vers la terre, est celui de la liberri; le vent de la terre vers le large est porteur des souverainetes. Le droit de la mer s'est toujours trouve au coeur de leurs affrontements.The history of international law since the Peace of Westphalia is in significant measure an account of the territorial temptation. The bonds of family, clan, tribe, nation, and faith; the need to explore, to trade, and to migrate; the hope for broader cooperation to confront common challenges—all in time came to be subordinated in the international legal order to the insistent quest for supremacy of the territorial state. At least in theory. At least on land.The sea yields a different story. It wasn't always so. And perhaps it isn't necessarily so. But in fact the law of the land and the law of the sea developed in very different ways. If the history of the international law of the land can be characterized by the progressive triumph of the territorial temptation, the history of the international law of the sea can be characterized by the obverse; namely, the progressive triumph of Grotius's thesis of mare liberum and its concomitant prohibition on claims of territorial sovereignty. That triumph reflected not only the transitory nature of human activity at sea, but a rational conclusion that the interests of states in unrestricted access to the rest of the world outweighed their interests in restricting the access of others at sea.

China and International Adjudication

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas S. Eder
Keyword(s):  
South China Sea ◽  
International Law ◽  
South China ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Law Of The Sea ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
International Adjudication

China aims to become a “leader country” in international law that “guides” the international legal order. Delivering the first comprehensive analysis of case law and Chinese academic debates from 2002 to 2018, this book shows that gradually increased engagement with international adjudication is part of a broad effort to consolidate China’s economic and political gains, and regain great power status. It covers trade, investment, territorial and law of the sea matters – including the South China Sea disputes – and delineates a decades-long process between caution and ambition. Both in debate patterns and in actual engagement, this book finds remarkable similarities in all covered fields of law, merely the timetables differ.

Historiographies of International Law from a Chinese Perspective

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Adele Carrai
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
World Order ◽  
Global History ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Chinese Perspective ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Scholars ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Selection Of

One objective of the emerging global history of international law is to broaden its scope in an attempt to overcome Eurocentrism. In this context, China, not only as an emerging global power that can influence the creation of the normative principles grounding the future world order, but also with its history of international law, offers a counter-teleology to the classic progress narrative of international law understood as a science. This article presents a critical summary and analysis of the approaches of a selection of Chinese scholars to the history of international law. The current debates seem to be closely linked to a new conception of modernity that does not correspond with the Western conception. The Chinese perspective, in this sense, can help broaden the history of international law, especially when that history claims to be global.

The Long History of the Regulation of Private Business Corporations in International Law

Veiled Power ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 220-228
Author(s):  
Doreen Lustig
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Legal Responsibility ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Private Business ◽  
Business Corporation ◽  
Business Regulation ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of

The conclusion challenges the prevailing narrative on the 1990s as the watershed period during which a new sensibility emerged towards the responsibility of private business corporations as subjects of international legal responsibility. While the prevailing account focuses on the private business corporation as a subject of responsibility, it ignores alternative conceptual frameworks that were central to debates over business regulation in international law such as businesses as participants, monopolies, or multinational corporations (MNCs). Furthermore, this narrative is frequently informed by an implicit historical account on international law’s limited influence (or none at all) on the regulation of private business corporations until the 1990s. Conversely, the conclusion draws on the findings of this book to problematize this narrative of marginality and demonstrates how the supposed marginality of the business enterprise in international law, ingrained as it is in the commonly accepted narrative, is a conceptual bias that facilitated (rather than prevented) the emergence and reach of the private business corporation and legitimized the elements in the international legal order that enabled it to thrive.

The Nomadic Sense of Law in an International Constitutionalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 234-283
Author(s):  
William E. Conklin
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Public International Law ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nomadic Communities ◽  
Legal Space ◽  
International Constitutionalism

This article examines the place of Nomadic peoples in an international constitutionalism. The article claims that an important element of a Nomadic culture is its sense of law. Such a sense of law differs from a constitutionalism which has privileged fundamental principles aimed to constrain acts of the executive arm of the State. Such a constitutionalism is shared by many contemporary domestic legal orders. Public international law also takes such a constitutionalism for granted. In the focus upon rules to constrain the executive arm of the State, the sense of law in Nomadic communities has slipped through arguments which the jurist might consider inclusive of the protection of such communities. This problem is nested in a legacy which has weighted down the history of European legal thought. The article initially identifies three forms of nomadism. The social phenomenon of nomadism has been the object of juristic commentary since the Greeks and Romans. The image of Nomadic peoples in such a legacy has imagined Nomadic peoples as lawless although the article argues that a sense of law has existed in such communities. Such a sense of law contradicts a State-centric international legal order. Public international law has reserved a special legal space relating to Nomadic peoples. The article identifies four arguments which might be rendered to protect Nomadic peoples in such a State-centric international community. Problems are raised with each such argument

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