SSRN PAPER: Oona HATHAWAY & Scott SHAPIRO, "International Law and Its Transformation Through the Outlawry of War", forthcoming in International Affairs

(image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Abstract:

The First World War was the last great war of what we have called the “old world order” — the legal regime that European states adopted in the seventeenth century and spent the next three centuries imposing on the rest of the globe. This order formed the basis of what scholars call “classical international law.” But this body of rules differed starkly from the ones that governs today: The old world order did not just sanction war, it relied on and rewarded it. States were permitted to wage war to right any legal wrong, and the right of the victors to extract territory and treasure from the losers was legally guaranteed. That all began to change when the nations of the world decided to outlaw war in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand treaty. As a result, the rules governing international behaviour have transformed radically — indeed, they are the polar opposite of what they once were. This article describes the decision to outlaw war and the transformation it unleashed in the world order generally, and in international law specifically. We argue that a simple but perplexing fact—that modern international law prohibits states from using force to enforce international law — is key to understanding international law and state behavior in the modern era.

Download the fulltext here.

(source: Legal History Blog)

SSRN PAPER: Matthias GOLDMANN, The Entanglement of Sovereignty and Property in International Law: From German Southwest Africa to the Great Land Grab?

(image source: SSRN)

Abstract:

This article argues that an intricate entanglement existed between sovereignty and property in German Southwest Africa. Germany’s control over Southwest Africa depended considerably on European settlements, which received logistical, financial, and military support by Germany. The result was a symbiotic relationship between the government and private economic actors, a form of state capitalism under which private settlements contributed to the establishment of territorial control, a prerequisite of sovereign power. Contractual relationships suggesting formally equal relationships, and during and after the genocide, a mix of arguments drawing on tort law and an idea of formal legality, provided crucial justification for the assumption of territorial control. This description contradicts standard accounts of sovereignty, which tend to turn a blind eye on private property. The article discusses the implications of these findings for today’s international law, including for state responsibility for transnational corporations and the so-called Great Land Grab, the acquisition of vast lands in Africa by foreign public and private agents.

Read the paper here.

Source: International Law Reporter.

SSRN PAPER: Matthias GOLDMANN, European Integration in the History of International Law [Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law & International Law (MPIL) Research Paper No. 2018-26]

(image source: scholarlykitchen)

Abstract:

This paper argues that the Treaties of Rome and the process of European integration they heralded had a lasting impact on the development of international law. However, their significance is usually misattributed. While European law has had little impact on international legal doctrine, and while European integration has remained unique as a political project, European law and the process of European integration have served international law as an important progress narrative. In this respect, they have had an influence on important background understandings characterizing international law since the postwar era, including on the perception of international law as universal, autonomous, pluralistic, and economically liberal. The progress narrative culminates in the view that international law is in a normatively ambitious process of constitutionalization, an idea imported from European law. This progress narrative is now under threat as European integration faces existential difficulties.The crisis of European integration might therefore anticipate a crisis of international law.

Read the full paper on SSRN.
(Source: Law & Humanities Blog)

SSRN PAPER: Timothy Louis SCHROER, Multinormativity in Western Arguments Regarding Punishment of the Boxers and their Patrons, 1900-1901 [Max Planck Institute for European Legal History Research Paper Series No. 2018-07]

(image source: Github)

Abstract:

Westerners applied multiple normative frameworks in debating policy toward China in the wake of the Boxer Uprising in 1900 and 1901. They variously claimed that treatment of China should be governed by the rules of international law, a code of honor, Christian teachings, the judgment of history, or ill-defined norms of civilization. At other times, however, Westerners called for violence against the Chinese without any meaningful normative basis. The law and the legal discipline have an imperializing character, as the law conceptually tends to subordinate other normative frameworks to itself and integrate them into its own normative order, dubbed law. The debate concerning China in 1900 illustrates that legal norms were inextricably and complexly entangled with other norms. It suggests that legal historians, if they are to grasp the past in its full richness, should attend to multiple normative frameworks beyond the law, since legal history cannot be divorced from its wider context. Moreover, scholars applying the lens of multinormativity should recognize that, at some point, norms end and a-normative arguments begin.

Read the full paper here.

SSRN PAPER: Jutta BRUNNÉE & Stephen J. TOOPE, International Law and the Practice of Legality: Stability and Change

(image source: SSRNBlog)

Abstract:

Drawing on the practice-turn in constructivism and in international relations (IR) theory more generally, our interactional law framework provides a counterpoint to the largely static accounts of international law that still prevail in the interdisciplinary literature. We argue that a particular approach to managing stability and change is inherent in, and indeed characteristic of, legality and the rule of law in international as in domestic law. Therefore, to get at law’s distinctiveness, and to understand the specifically legal interplay between stability and change, one must examine law’s internal structure. Furthermore, legality must actually be practiced. For example, the conclusion of a treaty is often just the beginning of a long law-building process – the document alone ensures neither stability nor change in law. Finally, a focus on internal traits and practices of legality allows full consideration of the formal sources of international law as well as the so-called soft norms that are shaping international interaction involving an ever-wider range of actors. Our “interactional law” framework places particular emphasis on what we call the “practice of legality.” We argue that this concept is central to understanding how law can both enable and constrain state actions, and why international law is a distinctive language of justification and contestation. In turn, the focus on stability and change is helpful because it directly confronts some of the persistent doubts and assumptions about international law, in particular in relation to international politics. Our work is animated by the intuition that the dominant views in IR and international law scholarship underestimate international law’s capacity to mediate stability and change, in part because they focus on the surface of law (treaties, statutes etc.) and external factors (interests, enforcement). They neglect the deeper structure of what makes norms law, and the distinctive practices that account for its relative stability and its capacity for change.

Read the full paper here.

PAPER: Eyal BENVENISTI & Doreen LUSTIG, Taming Democracy: Codifying the Laws of War to Restore the European Order, 1856-1874

(image source: SSRN)

Eyal Benvenisti (Lauterpacht Centre, Cambridge) and Doreen Lustig (Tel Aviv University) published "Taming Democracy: Codifying the Laws of War to Restore the European Order, 1856-1874".

Abstract:

In this article, we contend that the canonical narrative about civil society’s efforts to discipline warfare during the mid-nineteenth century - a narrative of progressive evolution of Enlightenment-inspired international humanitarian law (IHL) - does not withstand scrutiny. On the basis of archival work and close reading of protocols, we argue that European governments codified the laws of war not for the purpose of protecting civilians from combatants’ fire, but rather to protect combatants from civilians eager to take up arms to defend their nation - even against their own governments’ wishes. We further argue that the concern with placing “a gun on the shoulder of every socialist” extended far beyond the battlefield. Monarchs and emperors turned to international law to put the dreaded nationalist and revolutionary genies back into the bottle. Specifically, we propose that it was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 - 1871 and the subsequent short-lived, but violent, rise of the Paris Commune that prompted governments (more than any other war during this formative era of international law) to adopt the Brussels Declaration of 1874, the first comprehensive text on the laws of war. The new law not only exposed civilians to the war's harms, but also supported the growing capitalist economy by ensuring that market interests would be protected from the scourge of war and the consequences of defeat. The laws of war, in this formative stage, were more about restoring the political and economic order of Europe than about wartime. 

Full text on SSRN.

PAPER: Peter HILPOLD, How to Construe a Myth: Neutrality within the United Nations System Under Special Consideration of the Austrian Case

(image source: ESIL)

Prof. Peter Hilpold (Innsbruck) posted a paper on Austrian neutrality in the United Nations System, presented at this Interest Group's Workshop at the ESIL Research Forum (Granada, 30-31 March 2017).

Abstract:

In the 19th century neutrality was a highly appreciated concept. In the 20th century it has widely lost relevance and in principle it should be incompatible with UN membership. However, also under the UN system some states have opted for neutrality and it can be argued that there is still space for this status within the universal peace order. In fact, this peace order is far from perfect. There are several lacunae in the prohibition of the use of force and this concept is open to different interpretations. New challenges, such as international terrorism, are emerging that could threaten the absolute prohibition of the use of force. It is contended here that neutrals could play an important role when it comes to find an interpretation of this prohibition that best could reconcile the goals of peace and security with the overall - still imperfect - structure of the UN system. These questions are analysed with primary reference to Austrian neutrality which on the hand seems obsolete but on the other is forcefully looking for a new meaning.  

More information here.

PAPER ON SSRN: Samuel MOYN (Harvard), "From Aggression to Atrocity: Rethinking the History of International Criminal Law"

(image source: SSRN)

Prof. Samuel Moyn (Harvard) posted "From Aggression to Atrocity: Rethinking the History of International Criminal Law" on SSRN.

Abstract:

Explaining the shift from the priority of the charge of "aggression" in the beginning of the field of international criminal law to its exclusion in the age of the its reinvention around a suite of atrocity charges is the central task for historians in understanding this domain — and it also should matter for observers of the world today. Yet routinely, international criminal law is presented as running through a smooth trajectory, rather than a stark reversal or at least massive shift. For this reason, this essay gathers together elements for a case for the transformation in the first place, and floats some hypotheses about its timing and causes.

 (Source: International Law Reporter)