The membership of the ESIL Interest Group History of International Law had the occasion to renew the composition of its Steering Committee.
We thank Martin Clark (LSE), Hossein Piran (Iran/US Claims Tribunal) for their appreciated and valuable contribution in the past period.
Jaanika Erne (Tartu) and John Morss (Deakin) joined the board.
The current composition of the Steering Committee is as follows:
Markus Beham
Following a successful first term with the Coordination Committee, I would hope to continue the direction in which we have steered the IG these last two years together with my fellow colleagues. What I feel strongly for and would like to carry forward into the next term is our emphasis on the use of original archival material, out-of-the-box creativity in both topics and research questions, and further encouragement of diversity in all respects within our panels. Part of my personal agenda is promoting the exchange among historians, legal historians, and international lawyers working on legal history through mutually inclusive common events. I am currently an Assistant Professor at the Chair for Constitutional and Administrative Law, Public International Law, European and International Economic Law at the University of Passau, Germany and am an adjunct at the Section for International Law and International Relations of the University of Vienna, Austria. Having also studied history with a focus on Eastern European history, where my research interests were the ‘long 19th century’ with the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the history of population exchanges and deportations throughout the 20th century, I have been exploring selected aspects of these topics in our calls for papers.Frederik Dhondt
I am grateful for the ESIL IGHIL's memberships trust to continue running the ESIL IGHIL Blog, which attracts between 3500 and 4000 pageviews a month. This blog was created after the ESIL Conference in Vienna in 2014. I studied law (Ghent, 2007), history (Ghent/Paris-Sorbonne, 2008) and International Relations (Sciences Po Paris, 2009), and obtained the degree of doctor of law in 2013 (Ghent). I currently am an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (since 2015) and a Visiting Lecturer at the Law Faculty of the University of Antwerp since 2016. I teach international legal history, comparative constitutional history and political history. My research interests concern legal argumentation and diplomacy in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the interaction between constitutional and international law. I published on Franco-British diplomacy after the Peace of Utrecht (Balance of Power and Norm Hierarchy. Franco-British Diplomacy after the Peace of Utrecht, Brill, 2015) and on Belgian permanent neutrality between 1830 and 1914 (e.g. my chapter in International Law in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Inge Van Hulle and Randall Lesaffer, Brill, 2019). At the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, I am the director of the Research Group Contextual Research in Law (www.vub.be/CORE). More detail can be found on my personal website.Jaanika Erne
Prior to having B.A. and M.A. in law from the University of Tartu, LL.M. in public international law from the University of Helsinki, and M.A. in EU law from King’s College London, I was a student of theology at the Institute of Theology of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church from 1987 to 1999 and at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Tartu from 1996 to 1997. I am writing up my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Tartu, where I am aiming at understanding a legal-political concept - conferral of state powers, in its evolution in national and transnational contexts. From 1997 until 1999 I was a Fellow, and from 1999 until 2000 a Master Student at EuroFaculty section at the University of Tartu. In 2000, I began my studies as an Erasmus exchange student at the University of Helsinki, where I graduated from the LL.M. Programme in 2003. Thereafter I worked at the Eurodocumentation Centre at the Library of the University of Tartu from where I left for the traineeship programme of the European Commission in the fall of 2003. From 2004 to 2012 I was teaching public international law, EU law, and law concepts at Estonian and Finnish universities. In 2002 I was a successful examinee at the University of Thessaloniki Institute of Public International Law and International Relations’ 30th session ’International Challenges to Peace and Security in the New Millennium’. After that I have attended several international workshops and seminars in public international law and EU law, and some of my research articles and book reviews have been published in Juridica International, Acta Martensis Societatis, Trames, Nordic Journal of International Law, Baltic Journal of International Law, Thesaurus Acroasium, Ius Antiquum, Finnish Yearbook of International Law, etc. More details at the Estonian Research Portal. I believe in common intellectual and research space and think that comparative historical analysis could assist in building a bridge for understanding and explaining the opposites individual/state, science/politics, ideas/ideologies, but also systems and autonomies. jaanika.erne@ut.eeJan Lemnitzer
I am Assistant Professor at the Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark and was formerly Director of Studies at Oxford’s Changing Character of War programme. I have published on the history of international law in Diplomacy & Statecraft, the International History Review and the European Journal of International Law. My LSE PhD thesis on the 1856 Declaration of Paris has been published with Palgrave Macmillan under the title Power, Law and the End of Privateering. The books argues that the 1856 Declaration marks the beginning of the codification of international law, and my current work explores the 19th century expansion of international law more generally, and in particular what it can teach us about norm creation in novel and highly globalized areas such as cyberspace. In addition, I continue to work on the origins of the norm of civilian immunity and the history of international criminal law. I have served as the chairman of the Interest Group for the last two years.
John Morss
I grew up in London UK and first studied psychology (BSc Sheffield, PhD Edinburgh), taking a lecturing post at the Ulster Polytechnic (subsequently the University of Ulster), which is located in the northern zone of Ireland. Having migrated to Aotearoa/New Zealand in the mid 1980s to teach in an education department, my psychology scholarship turned increasingly from empirical to historical and theoretical issues around development, evolution, progress and similar tropes (The Biologising of Childhood: Developmental Psychology and the Darwinian Myth, 1990). Around the turn of the millennium I retrained in law at the University of Otago, and relocated to Melbourne Australia, gaining a post at Deakin University where my scholarship has been a mix of legal philosophy and international jurisprudence eg International Law as the Law of Collectives, 2013, and a paper on the status of the Vatican/Holy See in the European Journal of International Law, 2015, both of which include a smattering of amateur historiography.
