Bradley on Extradition in the Early Republic: International Law and Constitutional Authority

Curtis Bradley, University of Chicago Law School, has published Extradition in the Early Republic: International Law and Constitutional Authority as University of Chicago Law School, Public Law & Legal Theory Research Paper No. 25-34. Here is the abstract.

This Article is the first comprehensive account of the constitutional foundations of U.S. extradition practice and its relationship to international law. Through detailed analysis of early American extradition controversies—including the Longchamps Affair and the Robbins case—the Article shows how political actors and courts constructed the modern constitutional law of extradition, resolving key issues concerning presidential power, the role of the states, and the scope of congressional authority. This regime, the Article argues, emerged not from appeals to the constitutional text or original understandings, but rather from structural intuitions, consequentialist considerations, and, as time went on, historical traditions. As the Article further documents, the constitutional law of extradition had a relational interaction with international law, in that the views of U.S. interpreters concerning the nation’s international law duties were relevant to their views of constitutional authority, and vice versa. The Article also complicates the dominant narrative of a unilateral “imperial presidency” in foreign affairs by showing that, because of the liberty interests involved, extradition authority evolved and remained as a shared power, requiring a treaty-based or statutory foundation as well as judicial involvement. In this respect, extradition parallels the development of certain other unenumerated foreign affairs powers, including most notably the authority over immigration. Finally, the Article situates extradition within the broader field of foreign relations law, illuminating its ties to doctrinal developments such as treaty non-self-execution, foreign affairs federalism, and sovereignty-based legislative power—developments that still resonate today.

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Dojcinovic on War Crimes: Definition, History, Practice

Predrag Dojcinovic, University of Connecticut, Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute; International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1998-2017), has published War Crimes: Definition, History, Practice. Here is the abstract.

This encyclopedic entry on war crimes provides insights into their definition, historical development, and application in major international criminal trials. As some of the gravest offenses under international law, war crimes involve serious violations of international humanitarian law committed during armed conflict. Defined in Article 8 of the 1998 Rome Statute, they include targeting civilians, torture, and using child soldiers. Rooted in ancient norms and shaped by Grotius, the Lieber Code, and the Hague Conventions, the concept evolved significantly through the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols (APs), which extended protections to civilians and non-international conflicts. Enforcement by tribunals like Nuremberg, ICTY, ICTR, and the ICC has established clear jurisprudence, affirming individual criminal responsibility and refining the legal elements of war crimes.

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Drumbl on Justice Pal's Legacy: Keynote Lecture

Mark Drumbl, Washington and Lee University School of Law, has published Justice Pal's Legacy: Keynote Lecture. Here is the abstract.

This chapter examines the legacy of Justice Pal's dissent at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. It does so by peering into two sites. One site is postwar Japanese politics and memory. Another site is contemporary international law in the areas of criminality, the environment, and international organization. This chapter examines Justice Pal's footprintsin law and politicsand also counter-intuitively wonders what the world would be like had he not authored his lengthy dissent. Justice Pal was also about much more than his dissent at Tokyo. Hence, this project includes in Justice Pal's legacy footprint his subsequent work with the International Law Commission, along with his scholarly writings on political philosophy and international relations.

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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.

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Jones Corredera on The Origins of the Calvo Clause: Why Carlos Calvo Supported Napoleon III's Vision for Latin America

Edward Jones Corredera, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, is publishing The Origins of the Calvo Clause: Why Carlos Calvo Supported Napoleon III's Vision for Latin America in The Monroe Doctrine: History, Interpretations, Legacy (Cahen, Castellanos-Jankiewicz, and Simon, eds., 2025). Here is the abstract.

This chapter sheds light on the imperial origins of the Calvo Clause. It shows how and why Carlos Calvo, traditionally known as a stalwart supporter of the Monroe Doctrine, initially supported Napoleon III’s imperial vision for the advancement of the interests of the “Latin race” in Latin America. It emphasises how Calvo’s legal thought had a dual role as a critique and an instrument of imperial ambitions. It studies how Carlos Calvo’s diplomatic role as the representative of Paraguay tasked with the resolution of the Canstatt affair in Europe informed his views on international law, intervention, and the role of race in relations between the anglosphere, Latin America, and France. Drawing on his understudied Una página del derecho internacional (1862), this article shows how Calvo marshalled the comments on the affair of leading contemporary statesmen and jurists, such as Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys and Robert Phillimore, his querelle with Juan Bautista Alberdi, the father of Argentinian constitutionalism, and the support of his course of journalists writing in the leading European periodicals of his age, in order to encourage British officials to respect Paraguay’s sovereignty, and to bolster the principle that foreign claims had to be settled according to local laws. Above all, this chapter considers the continuities between Calvo’s defence of Napoleon III’s imperial gaze and his defence of the Monroe Doctrine, encouraging a more contextualised reading of the role of empire, intervention, and diplomacy in the emergence and popularisation of Calvo’s clause and doctrine.

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Sugarman on The Hidden Histories of the Pinochet Case 1

David Sugarman, Lancaster University Law School, has published The Hidden Histories of the Pinochet Case 1. Here is the abstract.

Although states are in certain circumstances legally obliged to arrest acting or former heads of state for crimes committed while they were in office, their governments often chose not to. The 1998 arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s former dictator, by a Spanish magistrate on charges of egregious human rights crimes, and the 16-month battle to extradite him to Madrid was the first time that a former head of state had, while travelling abroad, been arrested on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, and where a claim to immunity was rejected by a national court. Surprising almost everyone, this drama caught the world’s imagination. Never have the conduct and decisions of the UK’s Home Secretary, the Law Lords, and Amnesty International generated such international attention. The whole episode constituted the most intensive, high-profile litigation of its kind ever undertaken. Hugely controversial, it gave a massive fillip to human rights movements and galvanized victims, their loved ones, activists, and lawyers into action. Its cause célèbre status was magnified when Lord Hoffmann, who delivered the deciding vote when the case first came before the Law Lords, did not disclose in public his links with Amnesty International, an intervenor in these proceedings, thereby opening the way for the case to be reheard. Pinochet’s release on health grounds by Home Secretary Jack Straw, then rising from his wheelchair on landing in Santiago to wave at jubilant supporters, further magnified the notoriety of the case. Weaving together a variety of sources – including a unique set of interviews with key judges, lawyers and other actors involved conducted during or shortly after the case – this article provides what I believe to be the most comprehensive behind-the-scenes account to date of the legal proceedings in London. The story that emerges is full of coincidence and unpredictable decisions - a story with many plots and protagonists, victims, villains, and heroes. It reveals much that is new about the law and politics of the case. It illuminates the role of personal views and judicial creativity in top courts, the ways in which law operates in practice, and its promise and limitations. My hope is that the article will change the way we think about the Pinochet case.

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Lo Giacco on Giving Meaning to the Past: Historical and Legal Modes of Thinking @letizialogiacco.bsky.social @unileiden.bsky.social @de_Legiz

Letizia Lo Giacco, Leiden University Law School, has published Giving Meaning to the Past: Historical and Legal Modes of Thinking at 9 (2) Jus Gentium: Journal of International Legal History 371 (2024).

This contribution revisits the "turn to history" in international law by focusing on the debate on method between international lawyers and (legal) historians. The paper resorts to an analogy between interpreting the past and interpreting the law as giving-meaning activities to help elucidate points of juncture between these two disciplines. Against flourishing instrumentalist re-readings of the past and manipulative uses of history that both historians and international lawyers have denounced, this paper suggests a way to validate historical narratives and discern among those which contribute to the knowledge of the past and those who would not. It concludes that the "turn to history" in international law is better appreciated as a project geared towards re-assessing its own tradition, fostering self-reflection on international law as a set of doctrines and the role of international lawyers therein, i.e. what it entails to reproduce them as international lawyers.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Cui on False Idols in the Early History of International Taxation @AllardLaw

Wei Cui, University of British Columbia Faculty of Law, has published False Idols in the Early History of International Taxation. Here is the abstract.

A careful reading of recent scholarship on the early history of international taxation, especially on the League of Nations' work on "double taxation," ought to have dislodged many myths about this history. But more often than not, such scholarship is taken to offer mere details without altering our fundamental understanding. This paper suggests that this reception reflects a longstanding pattern in discourses about international taxation: participants perpetuate or cling onto narratives that are easily seen to be false. The paper exposes this pattern by summarizing evidence for four rarely-acknowledged conclusions about the League's output on international taxation. First, rather than advancing any agreed proposal, the 1923 "Four Economists Report" reflected fundamental disagreements (in both theory and practice) between the world's then two leading capital exporters, the U.S. and Britain. Second, the League's 1925 Technical Experts Report substantially changed the topic from the Four Economists Report. By focusing on coordination conventions among countries imposing only source-based taxation, it offered little of interest to the U.S. and Britain, and rendered international agreement even more difficult by conflating distinct policy issues. Meanwhile, it launched an institutional narrative that, whatever the problems of international taxation were, the League offered relevant solutions. Third, this narrative began to allow lobbyists like Mitchell Carroll to advance business interests under the League's disguise in the 1930s. Fourth, by the time of the Mexico Model, "the League's" double taxation work served little more than narrow institutional and personal interests. In each of these last three stages of the League's work, despite the lack of genuine intellectual continuity, parties appealed to earlier League outputs to legitimize their own (often questionable) pursuits. This practice continued in the activities of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation in the 1950s, and one suspects that it is even more significant today. The paper suggests that the durability of this practice may be attributable to both ambiguous principal-agent relationships in the context of weak international organizations sponsoring informal norm setting, and persistent intellectual confusion about the subject of international taxation.

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Nicastro on Redefining Women's Subjectivity Between Law and Revolution: A Foucauldian Analysis of Olympe de Gouges' 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen @alessia_ncs @GVAGrad

Alessia Nicastro, Geneva Graduate Institute, has published Redefining Women's Subjectivity Between Law and Revolution: A Foucauldian Analysis of Olympe de Gouges' 1791 Declaration of The Rights of Woman and Female Citizen. This paper has been accepted and presented by the author at the 11th International Conference on Gender and Women's Studies held on 13th July 2024 online, organized by the University of Mumbai, the International Center for Research and Development (ICRD), and Unique Conferences Canada. Here is the abstract.

This contribution investigates how Olympe de Gouges' "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen” (1791) contributed to reshape women’s subjectivity in international law and to advance a feminist vision of this field. Drawing upon Foucault's notions of subject, power, and resistance, this paper analyses how De Gouges' Declaration functioned as a political and discursive tool that disrupted the dominant gender relations of power embedded in legal discourses of the time. By claiming women's equality and citizenship, de Gouges’ work paved the way to the recognition of women as both political and legal subjects. The author concludes that de Gouges' Declaration was pivotal for revealing the androcentric character of the embryonic human rights law (which were only les droits de l'homme) and for highlighting the inherent contradictions in the Revolutionary ideals of equality, citizenship, and freedom.

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Stanley-Ryan on Ka mua, ka Muri: He Whakaputanga, Concealed Indigenous Histories, and the Making of International Law @ashstanleyryan

Ash Stanley-Ryan, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID); Victoria University of Wellington; Te Herenga Waka - Faculty of Law, is publishing Ka mua, ka Muri: He Whakaputanga, Concealed Indigenous Histories, and the Making of International Law in Law & History. Here is the abstract.

This article examines how our understanding of international law is harmed by the systematic erasure of indigenous experiences and histories. He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni is used as a case study. The article first considers several methodological considerations for legal historians. A theoretical approach is constructed which centres Māori voices and Te Reo Māori, and accepts that history is both political and contingent. In the next section, two parallel histories are detailed: pākehā stories of he whakaputanga as act to secure Imperial interests; and Māori recollections of he whakaputanga as an affirmation of independence, in response to an ever-more-intrusive world. The two histories are then considered through the lenses of jurisdictional encounter and international legal reproduction. These lenses show how history and law have undertaken a demarcating exercise, concealing Māori histories and removing he whakaputanga from legal relevance. This process has harmed international law, because it legitimises imperialism and hides law’s contingent nature. The article closes by recalling Moana Jackson’s call for ‘honesty about the misremembered stories and the foresight to see where different stories might lead’. NB: typos, including the use of the term "te re rangatira" rather than "te rangatiratanga", are not corrected in this preprint.

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Falletti on The Botanical Horti and the Dawn of International Law

Elena Falletti, Carlo Cattaneo LIUC University, has published The Botanical Horti and The Dawn of International Law, presented at the Conference The Power of Flowers, 1500-1750 - Gent, 14-16.6.2023.

As is widely acknowledged, botanical gardens are often seen as the successors of medieval arboreta, which served as a means of studying the medicinal properties of herbs but were typically controlled by religious monasteries. Conversely, they signify a new approach closely associated with the Renaissance. During the 16th century in Italy, knowledge about plant usage and their products (such as flowers, fruits, and seeds) transitioned from the confines of monasteries to the dynamic cultural and scientific milieu of universities. Notable instances of this shift can be observed in two of the principal states in Renaissance Italy: Tuscany and the Republic of Venice. Botanical gardens were founded in Pisa and Padua to return the oversight of medicinal plants to public institutions as a form of public health safeguarding. It was particularly crucial to regulate the production and trade of poisonous and lethal plants, which were considered covert threats. However, the role of botanical gardens underwent a significant transformation with the expansion of colonialism. New colonial powers, starting with the Dutch and later the British, adopted this model. The focus shifted from controlling poisons and medicinal effects to researching and understanding how to produce marketable commodities like exotic spices and plants as efficiently as possible. This shift, brought about by colonialism, is a crucial aspect of the historical evolution of botanical gardens. The onset of industrialization and the regulations concerning intellectual property rights also left their mark on cultivating and exploiting plant species, leading to the development of fresh techniques for growing and transporting plants. The significance of botanical gardens was instrumental in their evolution into scientific and experimental laboratories. This evolution raised further philosophical and legal questions, notably the pertinent query: 'Who owns nature?' This paper focuses on how these centers of knowledge paved the way for establishing international relationships governing exotic goods. Botanical gardens, through their research and experimentation, have significantly influenced these connections. Additionally, it seeks to explore how this approach continues to influence contemporary legal discussions, especially those relating to the protection of cultural heritage and biodiversity.

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Akande on An Imperial History of Race-Religion in International Law @RabiatAkande @OsgoodeNews

Rabiat Akande, Osgoode Hall, has published An Imperial History of Race-Religion in International Law at 118 American Journal of International Law 1 (2024). Here is the abstract.

More than half a century after the UN’s adoption of the International Convention on the Prohibition of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, a debate has emerged over whether to extend the Convention’s protections to religious discrimination. This Article uses history to intervene in the debate. It argues that racial and religious othering were mutually co-constitutive in the colonial encounter and foundational to the making of modern international law. Moreover, the contemporary proposal to address the interplay of racial and religious othering is hardly new; iterations of that demand surfaced in the earlier twentieth century, as well. By illuminating the centrality of race-religion othering to the colonial encounter and chronicling failed attempts by Europe’s “others” to secure international legal protections, this Article makes a case for crafting an attuned response in the present.

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Olasolo, Urueña, and Arévalo-Ramírez on Techniques for Conducting International Law Research from Critical Approaches @mario_uruena @Juris_urosario @WalterArevaloR1

Hector Olasolo, Universidad del Rosario; Iberoamerican Institute of The Hague (IIH); The Hague University of Applied Sciences, International Law, Mario Urueña, Universidad del Rosario, and Walter Arévalo-Ramírez, Universidad del Rosario have published Techniques for Conducting International Law Research from Critical Approaches in volume 32 of Díkaion (2023). Here is the abstract.

This article aims to construct a state-of-the-art resource regarding the theoretical foundations and methodological options for any researcher interested in working with critical international law perspectives. The four views chosen for this exercise (TWAIL, CILS, feminist theories, and social idealism) will be dissected regarding their theoretical foundations and relevant research methods and techniques. It establishes the framing of critical research in international law through monodisciplinary, multidisciplinarity, and inter-disciplinarity, depending upon the interaction between legal-international concepts and methods.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

ICYMI: Roscini on Intervention in XIXth Century International Law and the Distinction between Rebellions, Insurrections and Civil Wars @marcoroscini @UW_WLS

ICYMI: Marco Roscini, University of Westminster School of Law; Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, has published Intervention in XIXth Century International Law and the Distinction between Rebellions, Insurrections and Civil Wars at 50 Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 269 (2020). Here is the abstract.

This article looks at how customary international law rules on intervention developed in the XIXth century. In particular, different forms of internal unrest are examined in order to establish whether they entailed different regimes of external intervention. The article starts with rebellions and insurrections and then moves to discuss civil wars by distinguishing three situations: that where the civil war has led to the de facto secession of part of a State, that where the insurgents have been recognized as belligerents by the government of the State in civil strife and/or by third States, and that of a civil war where no recognition of belligerency has occurred. Finally, the article briefly looks at the alleged existence of a customary rule providing for the recognition of insurgency and at its effects on third State intervention.

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Janik on States Are Not Men: Traces of International Law's Creation Myth @RalphJanik

Ralph R. A. Janik, Sigmund Freud Private University; University of Vienna; Andrassy University Budapest; Webster University, Vienna Campus, is publishing States Are Not Men: Traces of International Law’s Creation Myth, in the Hague Yearbook of International Law (2022/2023), special edition. Here is the abstract.

The following pages will try to describe the evolution of the idea of states as moral persons in international law scholarship and how it has been perverted throughout the 20th century. It does not, however, attempt to describe the entire story or construe a logical, if not inevitable sequence of thinkers and ideas. Rather, several traces from the birth of sovereignty all the way to the UN Charter era shall be contrasted with more recent ideas emphasizing the separateness of states, peoples, and governments. The final part will then locate current legal thinking about statehood along the polar opposites of, on the one hand, states as idealized personifications of the common will of their people and, on the other, how a liberal understanding of limited sovereignty stands in contrast to anthropomorphic conceptualizations of statehood.

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Diver and Bradshaw on The Grapes of Wrath: An Artful Jurisprudence @alice_diver @qubschooloflaw

Alice Diver, QUB School of Law, and Jules Bradshaw, Liverpool John Moores University Faculty of Law, have published The Grapes of Wrath: An artful jurisprudence? in volume 2021 of the Steinbeck Review. Here is the abstract.

By documenting the harsh realities of the era, The Grapes of Wrath (‘GOW’) calls to mind those distressing UN Country Reports that both describe and denounce avoidable landscapes of poverty, hunger, homelessness, and dispossession. Steinbeck embeds the novel’s harrowing images within an unforgiving framework of human rights violations, most of which flow directly from human greed. The novel’s prescient yet timeless warnings speak not only to the various humanitarian crises brought about by climate change and unethical commercial practices, but also to many ongoing, perennial global atrocities: corrupt political regimes, gendered injustices, ethnic cleansing, and displacement of entire populations. It is landscapes such as these that still serve to both spark and underpin refugee existence: the need for a compassionate system of asylum-granting, firmly grounded in human rights law, clearly remains as urgent now as it was in Steinbeck’s time. As witnesses to such chronic disregard for human dignity, readers of the novel are not only tasked with judging those responsible: we must also evaluate the perennial failings of the various global and domestic systems that have enabled and perpetuated such egregious rights violations. The final scene, drenched in symbolism, still serves as a quasi-courtroom: before the bared breast of a Lady Justice figure we become jurists, and cannot help apportioning blame for all that has been witnessed over the course of the Joad’s journeying. A close reading now, almost a century later, serves as a timely reminder that similar atrocities continue: migrant and refugee populations remain especially vulnerable, not least where they have been displaced by poverty or political crises from all that was once familiar. This article argues that the novel’s central focus on “social realism” demands much in the way of “moral and emotional effort” (Benson, 9) from the reader: we should leave the book with nothing less than a highly “active compassion for the dispossessed” (Wyatt, 12).

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von Bernstorff and Mayer on The Historical School and German 19th Century Contributions to International Legal Thought

Jochen von Bernstorff, University of Tuebingen, Faculty of Law, and Max Mayer, University of Tuebingen, have published The Historical School and German 19th Century Contributions to International Legal Thought. Here is the abstract.

In the second half of the 19th century, European international law became what Western international lawyers up until the 1930s conceived of as international law. The transformative process during that time led to the establishment of a number of important concepts: the modern notion of the sovereign state as the foundational unit of an international legal order based on common consent; a dualist notion of customary law as an empirical emanation (state practice) of a common legal “consciousness”; post-natural law concepts of a ius ad bellum, sovereign equality, the balance of power, a (constitutive) recognition-doctrine; and the closely connected Eurocentric legal dichotomy of a “civilized” core of Western states and a non-Western periphery. The rise of these concepts was shaped by major political, ideological, jurisprudential and philosophical currents during the long 19th century.The contribution will disentangle some of the most important 19th century doctrinal developments and the associated German jurisprudential theories. In a first step we will describe the reception of the Historical School in international legal scholarship and its doctrinal implications for a modern theory of customary law. As a second step we will reconstruct the contribution of German theories of the sovereign will of the state as the formal basis of international law [Staatswillenspositivismus] leading to new theories of “common consent” and recognition. These two broader developments shaped the last decades of the 19th century and would have long lasting implications for modern international law. Despite the reformist rhetoric of our main scholarly protagonists, both the new historicist foundation of international law in custom and the late 19th century turn to multilateral treaties and common consent were regarded by late 19th century contemporaries as complementing each other. German Staatswillenspositivismus à la Jellinek or Oppenheim developed its theories on “common civilised consent” inside the new historicist foundation of European international provided by the reception of the Historical School in the mid-19th century.

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Tay on The Stories We Tell Ourselves: National Memories and Historical Narratives in International Legal Claims

Xuan W. Tay, University of Adelaide, has published The Stories We Tell Ourselves: National Memories and Historical Narratives in International Legal Claims. Here is the abstract.

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” The social sciences recognize that States are motivated by their historical narratives. Narratives play a key role in shaping how States understand their world and their place in it. Scholars of nationalism crisply note, “no memory, no identity; no identity, no nation”. The emerging international relations tagline, Ontological Security Theory, asserts that the conduct of States is also motivated by their self-identity needs. Even so, there are unsettled questions about the motivational strength of historical narratives, the processes by which narratives gain salience, and how narratives are crafted. Contrastingly, the role historical narratives play in motivating international legal behavior is not well-studied in the international law (IL) scholarship. Most scholars employ rationalist assumptions to explain the international legal behavior of States. Whereas other scholars turn to constructivist explanations, the literature here predominantly focuses on how legal norms affect the general conduct of States, not how historical narratives motivate international legal behavior. This is peculiar, given that the practice of international law typically calls on lawyers to navigate the subjective historical narratives States perpetuate. The proposed thesis seeks to contribute to both the social science and IL scholarship by pursuing a comprehensive understanding of how a State’s historical narratives motivate the international legal claims it makes. This is done through a three-stage interdisciplinary inquiry. It first draws on social science insights to conjecture a theoretical model of how a State’s historical narratives may motivate a State’s international legal claims. Secondly, this model is tested against an empirical legal examination of China’s international legal claims from the period of the Unequal Treaties to present day. The hypothesis to be addressed here is whether the theoretical model provides an intelligible basis for explaining how and why China makes the international legal claims it does. The third stage takes into account the empirical findings to modify the conjectured theoretical model, and suggest implications therefrom for both the social science and IL scholarship. At a broader level, it is hoped the inquiry will spur readers to reflexively consider the degree to which the practice of international law is informed by the stories we tell ourselves.

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McMahon on The Origins of Modern International Law: A Vocabulary for Justifying White Supremacist Colonialism

Thomas McMahon has published The Origins of Modern International Law: A Vocabulary for Justifying White Supremacist Colonialism. Here is the abstract.

What is "modern" international law? This paper reviews the history of the development of modern international law, usually intended to mean the break between the leadership of role of the Roman Catholic popes into an international law decided by states without reference to the popes. In other words, papal bulls of discovery, enslavement and other topics stopped having influence. "Modern" international law was especially important to ensure that countries such as England, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy could compete to steal the lands and resources of the rest of the world for themselves. In other words, modern international law was invented to give a legal vocabulary and justification for white supremacist colonialism without ever using the words "white supremacy."

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Cohen on Journeys Through Space and Time While Reading International Law and the Politics of History, Found on a Palimpsest, Translated For You, the Reader @UGASchoolofLaw @harlangcohen

Harlan Grant Cohen, University of Georgia School of Law, has published Journeys Through Space and Time While Reading International Law and the Politics of History, Found on a Palimpsest, Translated for You, the Reader as University of Georgia School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2022-06. Here is the abstract.

I was invited to a symposium on Anne Orford’s book, International Law and the Politics of History. On my way there, my mind wandered, and I found myself lost in a forest of half-remembered stories and unfinished thoughts. Searching for a way out, this is what I discovered.

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