CONFERENCE: Law(s) and International relations : actors, institutions and comparative legislations (Orléans, 15-17 SEP 2021)

(image source: Le Studium)

Conference description:

In the last twenty years, the study of the history of international law and of international relations has witnessed something of a renaissance. The bicentenary of the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) also led to several new publications on the Congress System and on the “security culture” that was established in the aftermath of Napoleon. Nevertheless, many lacunae remain, especially regarding the relationship between law(s) and international relations during the long nineteenth century and in the sociocultural history of international law as a discipline with its own actors, networks, venues, institutions and power circles. The aim of the present conference is to deepen our study of the interconnections  between law(s) and international relations through the eyes of a plurality of actors (e.g., legal advisers, lawyers, judges, activists, publicists, journalists, editors), institutions (e.g., foreign offices, courts, universities, academies of science, associations, libraries) and works on comparative law. Three focuses will be especially addressed by this conference. The first is the plurality of actors. We welcome proposals on legal advisers within governments, foreign offices and national or colonial administrations; on civil and administrative judges, admiralty courts and prize laws; and on lawyers, academics, peace activists, international thinkers, journalists and editors, including women as well as men. A prosopography of a group of actors is invited as well as individual biographies. The theme of the birth and professionalization of “international lawyers” will be studied as well as the various editors and the book market for international law. Our second focus will be on institutions. We especially invite papers studying the treatment of law(s) in foreign offices in a comparative perspective. For example, in Great Britain, legal issues were dealt by the Queens Lawyers until 1872 and afterwards by the Legal Adviser of the Foreign Office. In France after 1835, it was the Comité consultatif du contentieux that dealt with legal issues. But what about the foreign offices of other countries? Other institutions (similar to the Conseil d’état in France) may have also had their own “Foreign Office Committee.” How were these organized? Did they cooperate with the foreign office?  What role was played by scientific academies in the diffusion of international law? By the universities? By popular libraries? Our third and final focus is on the study of comparative law and its link to the development of international law. The Société de législation comparée, founded in 1869, was full of members of the first generation of the Institut de Droit International, while many comparativists were, vice versa, members of the Institut de Droit International. Scientific journals such as the Revue historique de droit français et étranger and the Revue de droit international et de législation comparée dealt with both comparative and international law. Papers on the progressive autonomy of the discipline and on the networks of the founding members are especially welcome.

Convenors:

Dr Raphaël Cahen, LE STUDIUM / Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow FROM: Brussels Free University  (VUB) - BE IN RESIDENCE AT: POuvoirs, LEttres, Normes (POLEN) / CNRS, University of Orléans - FR, Prof. Pierre Allorant, POuvoirs, LEttres, Normes (POLEN) / CNRS, University of Orléans - FR, Prof. Walter Badier, POuvoirs, LEttres, Normes (POLEN) / CNRS, University of Orléans - FR 

See full program here. 

(see call earlier on this blog)

BOOK: Ursula SCHULZ-DORNBURG & Martin ZIMMERMANN, Die Teilung der Welt. Zeugnisse der Kolonialgeschichte (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2021), 160 p. ISBN 978-3-8031-3697-8, € 28

 

(image source: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach)

Book abstract:

In einer eindrucksvollen Serie hat Ursula Schulz-Dornburg das monumentale Archiv der spanischen Kolonialmacht in Sevilla dokumentiert – Bilder, die ahnen lassen, was die Regale beherbergen: Geschichten von Entdeckungsreisen, von der Hybris der Herrschenden und folgenreiche Schriftstücke. Die Papiere scheinen sich zu rühren. Die Pappen sind schief, leicht geknickt, als habe sie jemand mit kindlicher Neugier hochgebogen, um ihnen ihre Geheimnisse zu entlocken. Sie bergen zahllose Schicksale, wissen von verschwundenen Sprachen, von Gier nach Gold und den Träumen von einer »Neuen Welt«: ein papiernes Monument der Macht in Schränken aus kubanischem Zedernholz, lichtdurchfluteten Marmorsälen, atemberaubender Architektur. Ursula Schulz-Dornburgs bisher unveröffentlichte, historisch einmalige Fotografien zeigen das Archivo General de Indias in Sevilla vor seiner Sanierung. Seit 1785 sind hier 300 Jahre spanische Kolonialgeschichte in Amerika archiviert, 8.000 Karten, rund 90 Millionen Dokumente – darunter beispielsweise das Bordbuch des Kolumbus sowie der berühmte »Vertrag von Tordesillas«: 1494 zeichneten die Könige von Portugal und Spanien, vermittelt vom Papst, eine Linie durch den Atlantik und teilten die neu entdeckten und noch zu entdeckenden Länder der Welt unter sich auf. Der Historiker Martin Zimmermann unternimmt eine Reise ins Zeitalter der »Entdecker« und erzählt von gefährlichen Überfahrten, der Begegnung mit dem Fremden, kolonialer Gewalt, der Macht der Kartografie – und vom unstillbaren Wunsch, sich die ganze Welt zu erschließen.

On the authors:

Ursula Schulz-Dornburg gehört zu den international renommiertesten deutschen Fotografinnen. In ihren Arbeiten erkundet sie Orte am Rande der westlichen Wahrnehmung und menschengemachte Grenzregionen, zuletzt in ihrer Ausstellung »The Land in Between« im Frankfurter Städel. Sie lebt in Düsseldorf.

Martin Zimmermann ist Professor für Alte Geschichte an der LMU München. Zuletzt erschienen von ihm »Gewalt. Die dunkle Seite der Antike« sowie »Die seltsamsten Orte der Antike«.

This book has been reviewed by Prof. Miloš Vec (Vienna) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 21 June 2021. 

Read more on the publisher's website.

BOOK: Andrew CLAPHAM, War [Clarendon Law Series] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 624p. ISBN 9780198810476, GBP 29,99

 

(image source: OUP)

Book abstract:

How relevant is the concept of war today? This book examines how notions about war continue to influence how we conceive rights and obligations in national and international law. It also considers the role international law plays in limiting what is forbidden and legitimated in times of war or armed conflict. The book highlights how, even though war has been outlawed and should be finished as an institution, states nevertheless continue to claim that they can wage necessary wars of self-defence, engage in lawful killings in war, imprison law-of-war detainees, and attack objects which are said to be part of a war-sustaining economy. The book includes an overall account of the contemporary laws of war and delves into whether states should be able to continue to claim so-called 'belligerent rights' over their enemies and those accused of breaching expectations of neutrality. A central claim in the book is as follows: while there is general agreement that war has been abolished as a legal institution for settling disputes, the time has come to admit that the belligerent rights that once accompanied states at war are no longer available. The conclusion is that claiming to be in a war or an armed conflict does not grant anyone a licence to kill people, destroy things, and acquire other people's property or territory.

 On the author:

Andrew Clapham is Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, which he joined in 1997. He has been a member of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan since October 2017. He is an Honorary Member of the International Commission of Jurists. In 2003 he was an Adviser on International Humanitarian Law to Sergio Vieira de Mello, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Iraq.

(read more with OUP)

ADVANCE ARTICLE: Miloš VEC, "A Luminous Trace. Commemorating the Frankfurt Lawyer and Historian of International Law Michael Stolleis (20 July 1941–18 March 2021)" (Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international) (OPEN ACCESS)

(image source: Brill)

First paragraph:

Perhaps it is not an inappropriate idea to have a profile of the late pioneer of global international legal history and emeritus editor of this journal, Michael Stolleis, begin in a Munich attic room. So let’s travel back a few decades, to Munich in the late 1960s, where Stolleis, a doctoral student and later post-doctoral lecturer, received crucial inspiration for his style of thinking.

Read further on the journal's website: DOI 10.1163/15718050-12340188. 

A German version is available here: DOI 10.1163/15718050-12340190

BOOK REVIEW: Simon MILLS reviews Noel MALCOLM, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750 (Oxford: OUP, 2019) (English Historical Review CXXXVI (2021), nr. 579 (Apr), 422-424

(image source: OUP)

First paragraph:

As its title suggests, Noel Malcolm’s book analyses the longue durée history of ideas on two distinct but closely related topics within Western political thought: Islam and the Ottoman Empire. Rejecting the ‘Orientalist’ paradigm—the contention, set out most famously by Edward Said, that European writing on Islam and the East was ‘a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient’—Malcolm argues instead that Western authors demonstrated an ‘active—even, creative—engagement with their Islamic or Ottoman subject matter as part of a larger pursuit of religious and political arguments within their own culture’ (p. 417).

Read more with Oxford Journals  (DOI 10.1093/ehr/ceab045)

BOOK: Jean d'ASPREMONT, The Discourse on Customary International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), ISBN 9780192843906

 

(image source: OUP)

Book abstract:

This book argues that it does not suffice to simply invoke and demonstrate the two constitutive elements of customary international law, practice and opinion juris, to successfully and plausibly make a claim under the doctrine of customary international law. Behind what may look like a very crude dualist type of legal reasoning, a fine variety of discursive constructions are at work. By unpacking these discursive constructions, the book depicts the discursive splendour of customary international law. It reviews eight discursive performances at work in the discourse on customary international law and makes a number of original and provocative claims about this aspect of law. For example, the book claims that customary international law is not the surviving trace of an ancient law-making mechanism that used to be found in traditional societies. Indeed, as is shown throughout, the splendour of customary international law is everything but ancient. In fact, there is hardly any doctrine of international law that contains so many of the features of modern thinking. The book also puts forward the idea that all discursive performances of customary international law are shaped by texts, are articulated around texts, echo and continue pre-existing texts, unfold in a textual space, or, more simply, originate in a text-constituted environment.

Read more with OUP (DOI 10.1093/law/9780192843906.001.0001).

SSRN PAPER: Alexandra KEMMERER, "Exile and Access: Lilly Melchior Roberts and the Infrastructures of International Law" (forthcoming in: Immi TALLGREN (ed.), Portraits of Women in International Law)

 

(image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Abstract:

In her two consecutive and yet closely interwoven legal careers, as a corporate lawyer in Berlin’s premier transnational law firm in the years of the decline of the Weimar Republic and as a law librarian and bibliographer in one of the world’s leading law libraries at the height of the Cold War, Lilly Melchior Roberts (1903 – 1966) was part of an intellectual project that encompassed the disciplinary fields of international law, comparative law, and the emerging field of European legal integration, inspired by conceptual frameworks and perspectives of transnational law. In this chapter, on a biographical journey from Hamburg and Berlin to Ann Arbor, challenging well-worn distinctions between content and infrastructures, scholarship and practice, faculty and library, the German-Jewish émigré lawyer Lilly Melchior Roberts will be portrayed as a transformative actor in the emerging field of transnational (and, in particular: European) legal studies as well as in the disciplines of comparative and international law.

Read the paper on SSRN.