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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

International Law’s Cabinet of Curiosities

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-29
Author(s):  
Daniel Joyce
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
International Law ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Cabinet Of Curiosities

This chapter considers the significance of objects for international law through the lens of collecting and curation. It focusses upon the history of the cabinet of curiosities (or wunderkammer) as a precursor to the modern museum. The metaphor of the cabinet of curiosities reveals the folly of international law’s ambition to represent and order the world. Interpreting and critiquing the history of international law in light of its material culture reveals its Eurocentricity and connection to empire. The chapter invites critical reflection upon the volume as a whole as a cabinet of curiosities, open to its limitations as a collection, but also offering innovation and contemporary insight through its idiosyncrasy and personal form. It concludes by considering the turn to materiality in the context of broader anxieties generated by the digital era.

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

The Balance of Power in International Law: A History of an Idea

1979 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Vagts ◽  
Detlev F. Vagts
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
International Law ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
World War ◽  
International Policy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of

The existence of a significant relationship between the concept of the balance of power and international law would be regarded as improbable by most modern international lawyers. They would think of the balance as a wholly obsolete conception and, in any case, as a part of international policy, or worse, part of cynical Realpolitik rather than of law. Earlier generations of jurists, however, did see international equilibrium either as an integral part of the system of rules of the law of nations or at least as a necessary precondition to the existence of such a law. Such a view of the interrelationship was never unanimous; indeed, there were in the past many legal observers who saw the balance of power as an obstacle to the development of an international legal order based on something more moral than force alone. This article is devoted to a study of the relationships between those two concepts as seen by the publicists who created the corpus of international law, principally during the period from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It is not a study of the balance of power at large—a topic to which volumes might be dedicated—but only of that idea’s relationship with law.

scholarly journals Turntablism in the History of International Law

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 472-496
Author(s):  
Jean d’Aspremont
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
New Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
Historical Turn ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
The Many ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract This article uses the metaphor of turntablism to shed light on the confinement of international lawyers’ engagement with history to the terms, vocabularies, and categories of the very historical narratives they seek to evaluate, disrupt, or displace. For the sake of this article, turntablism is understood here as the art of creating new music and sound effects by using one or several turntables on which a record is placed. This article argues that twenty-first century international lawyers engaging with the history of international law are talented turntablists in that the many historiographical works of international lawyers produced since the so-called ‘historical turn’ have remained confined to the very terms, categories, and vocabularies of the histories whose creation they have been discoursing and theorising. This article ultimately shows that turntablism is not the inevitable fate of international lawyers engaging with history, and that a radical historical critique is possible and should be promoted.

scholarly journals INTERNATIONAL LAW IN THE CONDITIONS OF TRANSFORMATION OF CONTEMPORARY WORLD ORDER

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (5) ◽  
pp. 0-0
Author(s):  
Анатолий Капустин ◽  
Anatoliy Kapustin
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
World Order ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
International Policies ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Relationship

The article discusses the role and function of international law in the transformation of the modern world order. A brief description of the main features of international contemporary international relations and the role of international law in maintaining international legal order is given. The relationship and interaction of international policies of States and international law is examined. Scientific schools of international law exploring the relationship of international law and foreign policy are analyzed. In this regard, the author draws attention to the problem of the legitimacy of international law and established international legal order. The assessment of challenges to the legitimacy of international law and its reflection in the current international legal theory is made.

Hugo Grotius: On the Conquest of Utopia by Systematic Reasoning

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Kadelbach
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

This chapter seeks to reconstruct the basic elements of Grotian thinking from his two most famous treatises, De jure praedae and De jure belli ac pacis. Both have different biographical and historical backgrounds and an entirely different history of reception. The first is foremost considered as a memorandum to serve commercial interests, whereas the latter is, with some justification, seen to pursue humanist idealism, the systematic ambition of legal scholarship, and the ordering idea of peace. However, since some of what has been called ‘Grotian’ is not much more than a standard taxonomy of the history of ideas, the chapter deals with adaptations of Grotius’ philosophy in natural law thinking and internationalist reception to assess how much of Grotianism came about in later epochs. The many contradictions in the work of Grotius both inspire and invite us to explore the distinctions between moral imperatives and positive international law.

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