Donaldson on Law, Legal Expertise, and the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes: Revisiting Early League Council Practice

Megan Donaldson, University College London Faculty of Laws, is publishing Law, Legal Expertise and the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes: Revisiting early League Council practice in the Cambridge Handbook on the League of Nations and International Law (Rasmussen, Ikonomou & van Leeuwen (eds), forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Through a new account of three early disputes, this chapter revisits the novel role of the League Council in interstate dispute settlement. This role was delimited by a legal threshold: the question of whether disputes arose out of a matter purely within a state party's national jurisdiction or domaine reservé. Application of this test, nominally left to the Council, prompted considerable experimentation with institutional forms, and particularly recourse to 'committees of jurists', an understudied, flexible and protean mechanism which would go on to be deployed in many spheres of League activity. Drawing on contemporaneous legal scholarship and a range of archival materials, the chapter sketches the Council's procedural management of three key disputes, redirecting focus to the larger landscape of institutionalized dispute settlement beyond the Permanent Court of International Justice. In this larger landscape, the chapter teases out the diverse characteristics associated with recourse to avowedly 'legal' expertise and reasoning. This close reading of varied 'legal' deliberations recovers the multifaceted relationship between institutionalization and legalization of dispute settlement-and suggests the complexity of relations between legal reasoning and peaceful ordering, both for contemporaries and for us.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.