Why International Lawyers Measure Time with a Telescope: Grotian Moments & Richard Falk’s Histories of the Future

Grotiana ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-228
Author(s):  
Edward Jones Corredera
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article contextualises the origins of the term Grotian Moment, coined and frequently redefined by Richard Falk. By generating a conceptual history of the idea and its uses, the article draws attention to the ways that Falk’s sustained interest in the question of temporality and the nature of change in international law can inform present legal debates. The recovery of Falk’s efforts to engage with critics, geopolitical changes, and new legal ideas by reinterpreting and reimagining the meaning of a Grotian Moment sheds light on its relationship to questions of free trade, Eurocentrism, and revolutions in international law. By considering the methodological parallels with the work of Reinhart Koselleck, this article emphasises the importance of both historiographical and historical debates for the study of change in legal history, the analysis of the global legacies of Hugo Grotius, and the generation of expectations of the future in international law.

scholarly journals Ambivalence, anxieties / Adaptations, advances: Conceptual History and International Law

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 747-771
Author(s):  
MARTIN CLARK
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Negative State ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Intractable Problems ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Or History ◽  
Historical Theory

AbstractScholars of the history of international law have recently begun to wonder whether their work is predominantly about law or history. The questions we ask – about materials, contexts and movements – all raise intractable problems of historiography. Yet, few scholars have turned to historical theory to think through how we might go about addressing them.This article works towards remedying that gap by exploring why and how we might engage with historiography more deeply.Section 2 shows how the last three decades of the ‘turn to history’ can be usefully read as a move from ambivalence to anxiety. The major works of the 2000s thoroughly removed the pre-1990s ambivalence to history, offering brief considerations about method. Recent efforts building on those works have led to the present era of anxiety about both history and method, raising questions around materials, contexts and movements. But far from a negative state, this moment of anxiety is both appropriate and potentially creative: it prompts us to rethink our mode of engaging with historiography.Section 3 explores how this engagement might proceed. It reconstructs the principles and debates within conceptual history around the anxieties of materials, contexts and movements. It then explores how these might be adapted to histories of international law, both generally and within one concrete project: a conceptual history of recognition in the writings of British jurists.Section 4 concludes by considering the advances achieved by this kind of engagement, and reflects on new directions for international law and its histories.

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.

Part III Regimes and Doctrines, Ch.35 Theorizing Free Trade

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orford Anne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Trade Agreements ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Market Distortion ◽  
Historical Trajectory

This chapter re-examines the history of free trade and its relationship to international law. It locates contemporary trade agreements within a larger story about the relation between the state, the market, and the social; explores why it is useful to place current trade agreements within a longer historical trajectory; offers a brief narrative of how the concept of free trade has moved across a two-hundred-year period since the late eighteenth century; and concludes that concepts such as free trade (and related concepts such as discrimination, market distortion, protection, and subsidies) are the product of political struggles over particular ways of understanding the world, justifying entitlements to resources, explaining why some people should profit from the labour of others, and legitimizing the exercise of power.

Concepción Arenal and the place of women in modern international law

2020 ◽  
Vol 88 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 211-253
Author(s):  
Ignacio de la Rasilla
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
International Congress ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Academic Study

Summary This article examines the long-forgotten first book-length treatise on international law ever published by a woman in the history of international law. The first part places Concepción Arenal’s Ensayo sobre el Derecho de gentes (1879) in the historical context of the dawn of the international legal codification movement and the professionalisation of the academic study of international law. The second part surveys the scattered treatment that women as objects of international law and women’s individual contributions to international law received in international law histories up to the early twentieth century. It then draws many parallels between Arenal’s work and the influential resolutions of the first International Congress of Women in 1915 and surveys related developments during the interwar years. The conclusion highlights the need of readdressing the invisibility of women in international legal history.

A Legal History of Brown and a Look to the Future

2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph D. Mawdsley
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Empires and Jurisdictional Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-199
Author(s):  
Lauren Benton
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal History ◽  
World History ◽  
Legal Pluralism ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law

The study of legal pluralism in empires has far-reaching implications for comparative legal history, world history, the history of international law, and the study of global legal pluralism. This chapter highlights three insights developed within this perspective and discusses some promising future directions for research. The first insight flows from the observation that jurisdictional politics in empires played a formative role in structuring processes of conquest and colonization. The second involves the finding that patterns of legal pluralism in empires influenced foundational legal and political ideas, in particular concepts of rights and sovereignty. A third derives from the analytical move of placing imperial legal politics at the heart of histories of global ordering. This chapter reviews each of these facets of the analysis of legal pluralism in empires to identify some critical lessons for understandings of global legal pluralism.

Grotius, Dio Chrysostom and the ‘Invention’ of Customary ius gentium

Grotiana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-44
Author(s):  
Francesca Iurlaro
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Main Claim ◽  
Customary International Law ◽  
Dio Chrysostom ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Normative Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ius Gentium

This article tackles the issue of whether and how Hugo Grotius conceives of custom as a formal source of the law of nations. The main claim of it is that not only custom plays a fundamental role in Grotius’s thought, but that his reflections mark a fundamental turning point for the history of customary international law. A crucial role in this process of re-conceptualization is played by Grotius’s reading of Dio Chrysostom, whose oration On custom provides him with an integrated account of custom as a ‘normative practice’ based on rhetorical judgment (as opposed to the Scholastic interpretation of custom as reiteration of voluntary acts). Consequently, I argue that Dio Chrysostom’s text helps Grotius to transpose the question of the normative legitimacy of custom from a moral to an interpretative level. To conclude, I will show that Grotius adopts two different rhetorical strategies to prove the existence of customary norms of ius gentium.

Contingency in International Legal History

2021 ◽  
pp. 44-59
Author(s):  
Genevieve Renard Painter
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal History ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Revisionist History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Of History ◽  
Second International

Why are international legal scholars abandoning international law’s structuralism and searching for contingent pasts and plural futures? And why now? I use a revisionist history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s claims at the League of Nations to explain the current preoccupation with the contingency-necessity debate. First, putting international law ‘in context’ yields more contexts and more contingency. This puts pressure on what counts as law, an issue of existential concern for international law. The controversy over contextualising and the contingency it exposes express anxiety about the differentiation of international law. Second, international law comes with its own theory of history. The debate shows scholars are repudiating international law’s own structuralist progress narrative. Third, the contingency-necessity debate is politics dressed as methodology. Necessity stories give international law a future to fight for, whereas contingency stories leave it rudderless. The controversy shows that we, scholars, do not know what to do about international law’s present or future. The heat shows we wish we did.

The Three Ages of International Commercial Arbitration

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikaël Schinazi
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal History ◽  
International Arbitration ◽  
Commercial Arbitration ◽  
International Commercial Arbitration ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Modern Era

Drawing on a wide range of previously unpublished sources, this unique history of international commercial arbitration in the modern era identifies three periods in its development: the Age of Aspirations (c. 1780–1920), the Age of Institutionalization (1920s–1950s), and the Age of Autonomy (1950s–present). Mikaël Schinazi analyzes the key features of each period, arguing that the history of international commercial arbitration has oscillated between moments of renewal and anxiety. During periods of renewal, new approaches, instruments, and institutions were developed to carry international commercial arbitration forward. These developments were then reined in during periods of anxiety, for fear that international arbitration might be overstepping its bounds. The resulting tension between renewal and anxiety is a key thread running through the evolution of international commercial arbitration. This book fills a key gap in the scholarship for anyone interested in the fields of international arbitration, legal history, and international law.

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