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 “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.

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.

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.

Myanmar

2019 ◽  
pp. 524-548
Author(s):  
Catherine Renshaw
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Peremptory Norm ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Forced Labour ◽  
Extreme Responses ◽  
The Military ◽  
State Resistance

This chapter discusses international law in Myanmar. The efforts of the International Labour Organization (ILO) Commission of Inquiry to eradicate the use of forced labour in Myanmar, and the nature of the military regime’s response to these efforts, represent a remarkable chapter in the history of international law. Of note, first, is the determination of the ILO to test the limits of its power to enforce compliance with the resolutions of its governing body. Second, Myanmar’s engagement with the ILO clarified the vexed issue of what constitutes a peremptory norm of international law. Third, civil litigation in the United States around the issue of forced labour by transnational corporations in Myanmar uncovered the scope and potential for domestic courts to apply international law. Finally, Myanmar’s variable and often extreme responses to the Commission’s findings demonstrate the dynamics of state resistance to and engagement with international law.

Inserting Visions of Justice into a Contemporary History of International Law

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Shirley V. SCOTT
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Interstate Relations ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Relations Of Power

AbstractThe history of international law is often told in terms of the rise and fall of great powers or as a mechanism of colonial subjugation. To the extent that these accounts consider justice, it is usually to demonstrate its absence. This paper points out that justice has been integral to the evolution of international law in the era of the United States. Individuals and members of civil society in the US and Europe have influenced systemic developments in international law through their efforts to realize a vision of justice in interstate relations, their vision being of a body of international law and a world court which together obviate the need for war. To suggest the possibility of an historical narrative constructed around justice is not to deny the validity of other histories focused on inequitable relations of power, but to point to the scope for nuance in the frameworks within which we portray international law and its history.

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).

scholarly journals The Empire of International Law?

2019 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-199
Author(s):  
Karen J. Alter
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Law School ◽  
Public International Law ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Sovereign Equality ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pan American ◽  
The Hague ◽  
History Of International Law

This review essay examines three intellectual histories focused on fundamental transformations of international law in the early twentieth century. Juan Pablo Scarfi's Hidden History of International Law in the Americas is most interested in debates about a Pan-American international law, meaning the idea that international law might work differently in different regions, which was debated but eventually gave way to the change that Arnulf Becker Lorca, a Lecturer in Public International Law at Georgetown Law, discusses. Becker Lorca's Mestizo International Law is most interested in how the conception that international law applied only to civilized nations transformed into the modern conception that presumes sovereign equality. The Internationalists, by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, respectively the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law and the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School, and seeks to understand how the normal (and legal) recourse to force in international relations was replaced by an international law that bans the use of force, except in self-defense. Ideas regarding these issues started to evolve in the late 1800s, but the transformative debates occurred at roughly the same time because the Hague Peace Conferences and the League of Nations allowed contestations over old versus updated understandings of international law to flourish.

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.

Nationality on Trial: International Private Law across the Mediterranean

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-113
Author(s):  
Jessica M. Marglin
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Legal Case ◽  
International Private Law ◽  
The Status ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Legal System ◽  
History Of International Law

This article uses a single, transnational legal case that played out between Italy and Tunisia in the 1870s and 1880s to tell a truly global history of international law—that is, one that goes beyond the boundaries of the West. Samama v. Samama was a fabulously complicated case that dragged on in Italian courts for almost a decade. The crux of the legal arguments concerned the nationality of Nissim Samama, a Jew born in Tunis; Samama’s nationality, in turn, would determine which legal system regulated his estate. The Italian civil code enshrined respect for the national law of a foreigner, but such foreigners were presumed to be Western. A case involving the national law of Tunisia and the status of Jews called the very foundations of the international legal system into question. In putting Samama’s nationality on trial, the case opened up debate over fissures in the emerging theory of international law: How could non-Western states like Tunisia fit into an international legal order? How did Islamic law intersect with international law? What was the status of Jewish nationhood in a world increasingly based on exclusive nationalities? The Samama case offers access to the voices of European international lawyers debating the ambiguities of their field, as well as those of Maghrebis articulating their own vision of international law. The resulting arguments exposed tensions inherent to an international legal system uncomfortably balanced between universalism and Western particularism.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document