ESIL Interest Group History of International Law

ESIL Interest Group History of International Law

Monday 4 January 2021

VIRTUAL MEETING: Raphaël CAHEN, Socio-Cultural History of International Lawyers (Orléans, Le Studium, 7 JAN 2021, 16:00 CET)

 

(image source: Le Studium)

Meeting abstract:
International law is said to be a distinct profession with institutions and journals first in the 1870's (Koskenniemi, Genin, Vec/Nuzzo). Nevertheless, from the Vienna Congress (1815) to the Franco-Prussian Wars (1870-1871), international lawyers have initiated professional practices that related to the development of International Law. They were involved in foreign offices, scientific academies, and universities, they wrote textbooks and articles and formed networks. This project aims to investigate the interaction between foreign offices and international lawyers as well as the link between political migration of lawyers and their implication in the making of international law. This research will therefore shed a new light on the discourses and processes leading to the institutionalisation of International Law. For the first time, it will also analyse closely the interactions between foreign offices and International Law as well as the juridification of international affairs in the 19th century. In this presentation, I will concentrate myself upon a prosopography of the international lawyers in the French foreign affairs ministry. Furthermore, I will investigate the consultative litigation committee of the Foreign affairs ministry that had been established in 1835.

On the speaker: 

Dr. Raphaël Cahen is postdoctoral research fellow of the University Research Council at the Research Group Contextual Research in Law and Guest Lecturer at the Faculty of Law and Criminology (VUB). In 2020-2021, he is Fellow in residence at the Loire Institute of Advanced Studies (Le Studium). 

(source: Le Studium