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.

Schultz and Ost on Shakespearean Legal Thought in International Dispute Settlement @IHEID

Thomas Schultz, King's College London, School of Law, and Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and François Ost, Saint-Louis University, Brussels, have published Shakespearean Legal Thought in International Dispute Settlement. Here is the abstract.

In this article, the authors examine the contributions of Shakespearean legal thought to our understanding of core aspects of international dispute settlement. These aspects include: the sweeping role of masks in law and in the resolution of disputes; the construction and deconstruction of authority; the purpose of law in arousing desire and thus action; the limits in recognizing informal international law as law; the benefits of exaggeration; the problematic ambition of adjudicators; the key role of passion, against rationality, in understanding and dealing with international disputes; the decision-making resources to be found in logics of life; exercising measure in the enforcement and reach of law; remembering that law deals with human beings in our quest for law’s purity and systematic organization; resisting single-mindedness; the relevance of a dialectic form of proportionality; and the inescapable need to embrace uncertainty. The authors also discuss the general relevance of law & literature, and law & theatre, for all manner of legal professionals and review Shakespeare’s own legal background and thus his a priori ability to deal with legal matters.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Hollander-Blumoff on Novel Negotiation

ICYMI: Rebecca E. Hollander-Blumoff, Washinton University, St. Louis, School of Law, is publishing Novel Negotiation in the Journal of Dispute Resolution. Here is the abstract.

In dispute resolution, a field of study that is inherently interdisciplinary, there is no clear metric for how we ought to delineate the limits of relevant domains. Literature, with its ability to transport us to different times, places, lives, and stories, can reveal critical and crystallizing truths about human interaction in both conflicts and transactions. Careful and cross-disciplinary analysis of literary works will only serve to amplify our understanding of negotiation behavior in ways that can enrich our writing, our teaching, and our thinking on negotiation. In this essay, I address three different novels and highlight the ways in which they help elucidate, and provide new insight into, some fundamental and familiar aspects of negotiation. While the situations in these novels often dovetail with academic dispute resolution literature on aspects relevant to the negotiation process, they add nuance and amplification.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

New From Elgar Publishing: Niels van Dijk: Grounds of the Immaterial: A Conflict-Based Approach to Intellectual Rights @ElgarPublishing

New from Elgar Publishing: Niels van Dijk, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research Group on Law, Science, Technology, and Society, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, Grounds of the Immaterial: A Conflict-Based Approach to Intellectual Rights (2017).

This book applies a novel conflict-based approach to the notions of ‘idea’, ‘concept’, ‘invention’ and ‘immateriality’ in the legal regime of intellectual property rights by turning to the adversarial legal practices in which they occur. In doing so, it provides extensive ethnographies of the courts and law firms, and tackles classical questions in legal doctrine about the immaterial nature of intellectual property rights from a thoroughly new perspective. The book follows the legal proceedings of disputes in patent, copyright and trademark law as they circulate from the sites of enterprises, through the offices of law firms, the court registry, the courtroom and the judge’s office, until they finally arrive at judgment. In this way, the central matters of a dispute are gradually transformed into immaterial works, inventions, or signs through the ceaseless ‘material’ operations of legal practices. This analysis sheds light on how seemingly abstract philosophical notions are rendered workable as concrete legal concepts with important consequences. Grounds of the Immaterial offers an inventive and refreshing take on intellectual property rights which will be valued by academics and students in philosophy, legal theory, legal anthropology and intellectual property.

 

Call For Student Papers, Writing Competition On Dispute Resolution

From Stacie I. Strong, University of Missouri:

A student writing competition is being organized in conjunction with the annual symposium convened by the Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution at the University of Missouri School of Law.  This year’s symposium is convened by Prof. Carli Conklin and is entitled “Beyond the FAA: Arbitration Procedure, Practice, and Policy in Historical Perspective.”  The symposium features Professor James Oldham, the St. Thomas More Professor of Law and Legal History at Georgetown University Law Center, as keynote speaker as well as expert panelists from England and the United States.

The competition is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution and offers a $500 prize to the competition winner.  The author of the winning paper may be invited to publish the winning submission in the symposium issue of the Journal of Dispute Resolution, subject to the agreement of both the editors of the Journal of Dispute Resolution and the winning author.

Submissions should bear some relationship to the history of dispute or conflict resolution, broadly defined.  Topics may therefore consider issues relating to the historic development of international or domestic negotiation, mediation, conciliation and/or arbitration, among other things.  There is no requirement that papers discuss U.S. law, and submissions may approach the issues from a legal, historical, and/or political science perspective.  Papers must be received no later than 11:59 p.m., Central time, on Monday, November 9, 2015.

Further information on the writing competition is available on the symposium website.

Questions may be directed to:
Professor S.I. Strong
University of Missouri School of Law
Email:  strongsi@missouri.edu
Tel.:  +1 573 882 2465

Please feel free to circulate this information to other interested persons.

Kind regards,

S.I. Strong, FCIArb

Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law
Senior Fellow, Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution
University of Missouri
216 Hulston Hall
Columbia, MO  65211 USA
Tel.: +1 573 882 2465
Email:  strongsi@missouri.edu