ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

ASLH/Notre Dame Graduate Legal History Colloquium

September 27, 2025  | 10 AM - 3 PM (CST)
Notre Dame Law School | Chicago, IL

Registration/Welcome, 09:45 - 10:05 AM
Coffee & Morning Refreshments

Paper #1: Property Law and Indian Removal, 10:05 - 11:00 AM

"Indigenous Incendiaries: Forest Fires, Arson Law, and Ute Removal in 1870s Colorado"

Author:     Jacquelyn M. Davila, Yale University 
Respondent:    M. Todd Henderson, University of Chicago Law School

Paper #2: Colonization and Property Law, 11:05 - 12:00 PM

"Property Law as Colonial Forerunner"

Author:     Nathan Lee, New York University 
Respondent:    Nadav Shoked, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

Afternoon Break (Lunch), 12:05 - 1:00 PM

Paper #3: International Taxation, 01:05 - 2:00 PM

"Southern African Mining and the Modern Formation of Offshore Finance, 1860 - 1925"

Author:     Simon Rakei, University of Michigan
Respondent:    Ajay K. Mehrotra, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law

Paper #4: The Common Law and the Fourth Amendment, 02:05 - 3:00 PM

"What is a House? Investigating the Meaning of Curtilage at Common Law" 

Author:     Mitchell Del Bianco, University of Virginia 
Respondent:    R. H. Helmholz, University of Chicago Law School

Van Schaack's Annotated Bibliography on Crimes against Humanity

Beth Van Schaack, the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School, has posted Crimes Against Humanity: An Annotated Bibliography:

This is an annotated bibliography of scholarship and jurisprudence involving crimes against humanity, an important element of the international criminal law canon. It elucidates the history of this offense (which traces its roots to the World War I period), elements of this offense, lingering areas of doctrinal indeterminacy, efforts at universal codification, and the most innovative scholarship grappling with the reach of this international offense. 

--Dan Ernst 

A Publishing History of Grotius's De iure belli ac pacis

The Unseen History of International Law, a history of the publishing of Hugo Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis, edited by Mark Somos, Matthew Cleary, Pablo Dufour, Edward Jones Corredera, and Emanuele Salerno, has been published by the Oxford University Press:

The Unseen History of International Law locates and describes almost one thousand surviving copies of the first nine editions of Hugo Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis (IBP) published between 1625 and 1650. Meticulously reconstructing the publishing history of these first nine editions and cataloguing copies across hundreds of collections, The Unseen History provides fundamental data for reconstructing the impact of IBP across time and space. It also examines annotations that thousands of owners and readers have left in IBP copies over four centuries, offering original insights into the development of international law.

Grotius' De iure belli ac pacis has been commonly regarded as the foundation of modern international law since its first appearance in 1625. Most major international law scholars have engaged with IBP, often owning and richly annotating their own copies. At key moments - including the demise of the Holy Roman Empire, the fall of Napoleon, and the end of both world wars - IBP was reissued with new commentaries by multinational projects devoted to restarting the international order. Despite the enormous literature on IBP's reception and influence, we cannot fully understand its impact without uncovering the history of IBP as a physical object, with hundreds of thousands of unpublished annotations arguing or agreeing with the text, updating and adapting its contents.

Approaching Grotius' seminal work as a physical vehicle of the author's, the publishers', owners', and readers' engagement, The Unseen History radically expands and revises our understanding not only of IBP, but also of the academic discipline and lived practice of modern international law over the last four centuries. In addition to delving into the first nine editions' printing history, descriptive bibliography, and both Grotius' and the publishers' marketing and donation strategies, the book explores Grotius' subsequent impact on pro-slavery and abolitionist litigation as a case study of how the census' original findings can be applied to specific areas of reception.

--Dan Ernst

Engelking on Kant, Kelsen and International Law

Wojciech Engelking, University of Warsaw, has published How Kantian is Kelsen’s Early Theory of International Law? in Law and History Review:

In this article, the author examines the influence of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical ideas on Hans Kelsen’s early theory of international law. He situates Kelsen’s work within the post-World War I context, where Kant’s vision of perpetual peace significantly impacted the creation of international organizations. The article delves into Kelsen’s seminal work “Das Problem der Souveränität und die Theorie des Völkerrechts,” exploring how Kelsen’s pure theory of law parallels and diverges from Kant’s concepts. While Kelsen’s ideas were shaped by Kantian philosophy, particularly in promoting a lawful international order, Kelsen transcended Kant by developing a more rigorous, epistemologically grounded legal theory. The author argues that Kelsen’s adaptation of Kantian principles reflects both a continuation and transformation of Kant’s vision, tailored to the political and cultural challenges of early 20th-century Europe.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Invisible Actors in the Making of International Law, 1750-2000

Via H-Net, we have the following CFP: Invisible Actors in the Making of International Law, 1750-2000 (Sciences Po Paris, 27–28 November 2025).

Location: France 

Subject Fields: Diplomacy and International Relations, Law and Legal History, Maritime History / Studies, Social History / Studies

Call for papers: Invisible Actors in the Making of International Law, 1750-2000
Colloque junior, CHSP, Sciences Po Paris, 27–28 November 2025

Abstracts submission deadline: 10 August 2025 

Contact: invisibleactors2025@gmail.com  

Co-funded by Sciences Po School of Research and the Centre for History and Economics in Paris

Organising committee: Clarisse Anceau (École de Droit SciencesPo); Lorenzo Bonomelli (CHSP/SSM Naples); Amina Hassani (École de Droit SciencesPo/Geneva); Conor Muller (Oxford/CHSP); Giovanni Roggia (CHSP/Univ. Roma Tre).

Scientific committee: Daniela Luigia Caglioti (Univ. Federico II Napoli); Jean d'Aspremont (École de droit Sciences Po/Manchester); Renaud Morieux (Cambridge); Horatia Muir Watt (École de droit Sciences Po); Paul André Rosental (CHSP); David Todd (CHSP-CHEP); Dina Waked (École de droit/École de la recherche Sciences Po).

Duration: 1.5 days (one afternoon and one full day) 

Participants: 9–12 PhD candidates and early career scholars

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

 

Law & Society James Willard Hurst Book Prize to Powers, "Arbitraring Empire"

At the recent meeting of the Law and Society Association, the winner of James Willard Hurst Book Prize was announced. The prize "is awarded annually . . . for the best work in socio-legal history published in the previous year." This year's winner was Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2024), by Allison Powers (University Wisconsin-Madison). The citation:

The Hurst Awards Committee has selected Allison Power’s book Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law as the recipient of the 2025 prize.  The book is a tour de force, drawing extensively on archival research to provide a richly textured account of the United States role in transforming international law.  The committee was impressed by the book’s nuance and rigorous historical detail, tracing how the United States has wielded authority not only to shape outcomes in international disputes through formal law and the use of international tribunals, but also at local economic levels such as Cuban sugar plantations, the locks and stops of the Panama Canal, the Texas cotton fields, and Arizona copper mines.  

The book is an excellent achievement that never loses sight of the consequences of the U.S. government’s political and economic influence in international law, disputes, and economic violence.   It is a work that thoughtfully narrates how “ordinary people” from throughout the world have attempted to use international law to advance the search for justice.  The manuscript is compellingly written, and thoroughly researched.  It resituates how American law and power have been framed during the past two centuries and the communities rendered invisible.  It is an excellent contribution to law and society scholarship.

Congratulations to Professor Powers!

-- Karen Tani

Lange on Nazi Lawyers and the Invasion of Poland

Felix Lange, University of Cologne, has published, open access, Claiming Legality: German Lawyers under the Swastika and the Aggression against Poland, in Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht 85:1 (2025) 17-42:

The article studies how German lawyers under the swastika justified the German aggression against Poland in 1939 and questioned the support of the United States for Poland and its Allies. It distinguishes three lines of argument: First, they claimed that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was devoid of normative content and thus could not bind the German Reich. This argument was coupled with a political critique of the League of Nations Covenant and the Kellogg-Briand Pact as instruments for maintaining the territorial status quo. Second, they put forward that the German Reich was acting in self-defence and that it was Poland, France, and Great Britain who had violated the Covenant and the Pact. Third, they rejected efforts to reconceptualise the existing rules of neutrality in light of the Covenant and the Pact. Reliance on a more traditional understanding of neutrality was intended to raise legal obstacles to siding with Poland, France, and Great Britain for third states such as the United States.

--Dan Ernst.  H/t ESCLH.

Poole and Clark on Adam Smith's Concept of "The Federative"

Thomas Poole and Martin Clark have published The Fragile Power of Political Nations: Adam Smith’s Federative open access in Modern Intellectual History:

Adam Smith (NYPL)

This article examines Adam Smith’s concept of the federative: the double-facing constitutional power to conduct international relations today called the treaty or foreign-affairs power. We reconstruct Smith’s account of the federative from his major and minor works and demonstrate its importance in his account of law and empire. We first examine Smith’s early “internal federative,” where the power grows from the internal constitutional organization of the state. What starts as a democratic right to wage war and make peace becomes concentrated over time in the sovereign and its advisers as a “senatoriall” power. We then turn to the “external federative” in Smith’s later works, where the federative is redesigned as a power to unify colonial legislative bodies, connecting the familial sentiments of Britain and America, and forming a model for moving, slowly, towards the conditions Smith deemed necessary for international justice.

--Dan Ernst

Sellars on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea

Kirsten Sellars has published A ‘Constitution for the Oceans': The Long Hard Road to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Cambridge University Press):

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed in 1982, was the culmination of half a century of legal endeavour. Earlier attempts to create  a treaty regime governing the oceans – at League of Nations and United Nations conferences held in 1930, 1958 and 1960 – had all failed to settle the breadth of the territorial sea, and in two cases failed to settle anything at all.  During the negotiations, legal concepts were formulated and reformulated: straight baselines inspired archipelagic baselines; fishing conservation zones became exclusive economic zones; innocent passage through straits metamorphosed into transit passage through straits; and seabed common heritage was replaced by the parallel system of seabed exploitation. Many of the issues that animated the delegates during the negotiations – ocean pollution, overfishing, naval mobility, continental shelf claims and the impact of seabed mining – continue to exercise policymakers and lawyers to this day.

--Dan Ernst

BU Spring 2025 History of International Law Speaker Series

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future [at Boston University] is pleased to announce the International History Institute’s (IHI) Spring 2025 “History of International Law” speaker series. All three events will be held in the Pardee School of Global Studies’ Riverside Room at 121 Bay State Road. The series is open to the public. Please register to attend here.

Thursday, January 30 | 5:00-6:30 pm
Keynote Lecture: “The Law of International Society: Remarks on a Domesticated Notion”

Martti Koskenniemi, Professor Emeritus of International Law, University of Helsinki

Wednesday, February 26 | 4:00-5:30 pm
Book Talk: “Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law & the Making of Latin America”

Edward Jones Corredera, Senior Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for
Comparative Public Law and International Law

Discussant: Felipe Ford Cole, Assistant Professor, Boston College Law School

Wednesday, March 26 | 4:00-5:30 pm
Book Talk: “Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion & the Transformation of International Law”

Allison Powers Useche, Assistant Professor of History, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Discussant: Andrei Mamolea, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University

Sugarman on the "Hidden Histories" of the Pinochet Case

David Sugarman, Lancaster University Law School, has published “The Hidden Histories of the Pinochet Case” open access in the Journal of Law and Society   51: 4 (2024): 459–490:

Credit: LC

The world’s imagination was caught by the 1998 arrest in London of General Augusto Pinochet on charges of egregious human rights crimes and the 16-month battle to extradite him to Madrid. For the first time, a former head of state had, while travelling abroad, been arrested on such charges, with his claim to immunity being rejected by a national court. The case’s notoriety increased when Lord Hoffmann, a judge when it first came before the Law Lords, did not publicly disclose his links with Amnesty International, an intervenor in the proceedings. Pinochet’s release on health grounds compounded the controversy. This article reveals hidden histories behind the Pinochet case, advancing our understanding of its progression and wider significance. It illuminates the relationship between law and politics, the role of personal views and judicial creativity in the UK’s top court, the ways in which law operates in practice, and its promise and limitations.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Balkinization has been hosting a symposium on Kunal Parker's The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023).  So far, Aziz Rana, Ajay K. Mehrotra, Paul Gowder, Amalia D. Kessler, and John Fabian Witt have contributed.
  

• The Institute for Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London has announced the establishment of the Law and the Humanities Hub (LHub), led by Anat Rosenberg.  It “aims to foster academic expertise, creativity, and intellectual leadership in law and the humanities.”  Here are its 2024/25 Visitors.
  

• The Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission has digitized approximately 3,700 case files from 1819 to 1865.  Its "freely accessible and user-friendly website . . . will be publicly available within the next few months."  More.
  

• The University of Chicago Law School will host a book launch for Curtis Bradley’s Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs: Constitutional Authority in Practice, with comments by Will Baude and David Strauss, on Wednesday, December 3, 12:15pm to 1:10pm, at the Law School.  The event is open to the public.
  

• A notice of the 44th German Legal History Conference (Goethe Universität).

• A notice of a conference at Kings College London in support of the Cambridge History of International Law volume on the Pacific from circa 1500 until 1920 (KCL).
  

• The National Constitution Center will hold a symposium on The Life and Constitutional Legacy of Gouverneur Morris at Noon ET on Thursday, December 12 with Dennis Rasmussen, Melanie Randolph Miller, and William Treanor.  Jeffrey Rosen will moderate.
  

• The next session in the American Society for Legal History series, Making Connections: New Works in Legal History, will occur on Wednesday, December 11, 6-7pm Central Time. Chlöe Kennedy will discuss her Inducing Intimacy: Deception, Consent and the Law (2024) with interlocutor Catherine Evans.  ASLH President Barbara Welke will moderate.  Register here.
  

• On Lawfare's "Chatter" podcast, Rachel Shelden, Penn State University, discusses how widespread violence and another civil war were avoided as the nation resolved the disputed presidential election of 1876.
  

• Thomas McSweeney's Jot on Ada Maria Kuskowski's, "The Time of Custom and the Medieval Myth of Ancient Customary Law," 99 Speculum 143 (2024).
  

• ICYMI: Sandra Day O'Connor was no conservative (HNN).  The price America paid for the Chinese Exclusion Act (NPR).  Open access (for a few more days): The Case of the Slave Ship Zong (History Today).
  

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

ASLH Max Planck Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective to Aden Knaap

Continuing our round-up of the prizes and award announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Max Planck Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective -- awarded for the first time this year. About the prize: 

The Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective will honor exceptional dissertations on topics in European legal history in global perspective and presented for PhD or JSD degrees awarded in the previous calendar year. Topics may include European legal interactions with people or places outside Europe, legal processes spanning Europe and other world regions, and developments in legal theory closely related to imperial, transnational, or trans-regional trends.

This inaugural award went to Aden Knaap (Henry Chauncey ’57 Postdoctoral Fellow, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs) for “Judging the World: International Courts and the Origins of Global Governance, 1899–1971” (Harvard University, 2023). The citation:

The 2023 Max Planck-ASLH Dissertation Prize is awarded to Aden Knaap for his dissertation “Judging the World: International Courts and the Origins of Global Governance, 1899–1971.” This deeply original, carefully researched study presents a sweeping history of world courts, from early initiatives in 1899 to the postwar origins of today’s international courts. The dissertation makes two key contributions. It emphasizes formative efforts to establish world courts in the first half of the twentieth century, an overlooked but important period, and places visions of world courts at the very center of the evolution of global governance. The dissertation reveals how plans for key international institutions, including the World Bank and the United Nations, imagined them initially as global courts. Knaap’s study is based on extensive research in multiple archives and is beautifully written. It brings together legal, diplomatic, and international history in exposing an understudied but important dimension of European and global legal history.

Congratulations to Aden Knaap!

-- Karen Tani

Özsu's "Completing Humanity"

Umut Özsu, Carleton University,has published Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82 (Cambridge University Press):

After the Second World War, the dissolution of European empires and emergence of 'new states' in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and elsewhere necessitated large-scale structural changes in international legal order. In Completing Humanity, Umut Özsu recounts the history of the struggle to transform international law during the twentieth century's last major wave of decolonization. Commencing in 1960, with the General Assembly's landmark decolonization resolution, and concluding in 1982, with the close of the third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea and the onset of the Latin American debt crisis, the book examines the work of elite international lawyers from newly independent states alongside that of international law specialists from "First World" and socialist states. A study in modifications to legal theory and doctrine over time, it documents and reassesses post-1945 decolonization from the standpoint of the 'Third World' and the jurists who elaborated and defended its interests.

Among the endorsements:

"In his stunning and unprecedented book, Umut Özsu describes the ambition and breadth of the decolonizing agenda — and why international law mattered so much to it – while probing the impasses, limits, and resistance that foiled it. An accessible and dramatic story, Completing Humanity is based on exemplary learning and overflowing with insight and provocation: the most significant and sophisticated contribution to the history of international law written in many years."

Samuel Moyn, Yale University

--Dan Ernst

Brinkman on "Sea Power, Neutrality, and Prize Law in the Seven Years' War"

Cambridge University Press has published Balancing Strategy: Sea Power, Neutrality, and Prize Law in the Seven Years' War (2024), by Anna Brinkman (King's College London). A description from the press:

What is the relationship between seapower, law, and strategy? Anna Brinkman uses in-depth analysis of cases brought before the Court of Prize Appeal during the Seven Years' War to explore how Britain worked to shape maritime international law to its strategic advantage. Within the court, government officials and naval and legal minds came together to shape legal decisions from the perspectives of both legal philosophy and maritime strategic aims. As a result, neutrality and the negotiation of rights became critical to maritime warfare. Balancing Strategy unpicks a complex web of competing priorities: deals struck with the Dutch Republic and Spain; imperial rivalry; mercantilism; colonial trade; and the relationships between metropoles and colonies, trade, and the navy. Ultimately, influencing and shaping international law of the sea allows a nation to create the norms and rules that constrain or enable the use of seapower during war.

Praise from reviewers:

'This is imperial, military, legal and maritime history at its scrupulous and creative best, at once both micro- and macro-historical. Through a detailed reconstruction of four cases coming before Britain's Court of Prize Appeal and concerning two Dutch and two Spanish vessels captured during the Seven Years War, Anna Brinkman convincingly reveals for the first time the overarching strategic role that the court played in balancing domestic and international law to keep the Dutch Republic and Spain neutral during the global conflict. Particularly nuanced - and wholly unique in prize history - is her attention to the human dimension of legal process: the myriad of people, personalities, ties, interests, and environments that destabilized or undergirded neutrality. A triumph of insight and scholarship.' -- David Hancock

'Balancing Strategy opens a window into the complex interplay of law, empire, seapower, and strategy. Through meticulous and well-documented case studies that incorporate legal records, private political accounts, and the popular press, Brinkman offers new insight into how Britain sought legitimacy for its increasing projection of power on the global stage.' -- Sarah Kinkel

An interview with Brinkman is available here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

Weekend Roundup

• Over at Balkinization, an interesting symposium on David Pozen's The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford University Press, 2024) has wrapped up. This response by Pozen (Columbia Law) links to the various contributions, including by legal historian Shaun Ossei-Owusu (Penn Law).

• Also at Balkinization: Reva Siegel (Yale Law) and Mary Ziegler (UC Davis) on "Access to Life- and Health-Preserving Care - A History and Tradition."
  

• Edward A. Purcell, New York Law School, looks back to Charles Evans Hughes's Supreme Court of the United States for inspiration on how Chief Justices can induce the resignations of Associate Justices  (The Hill).

• Barbara Lauriat, Texas Tech University School of Law, has published Robinson & Roberts v. Wheble (1771): A New “First” Trademark Case at Common Law in The Docket.
  

• You may still register for the virtual event of the Supreme Court Historical Society, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms, with Alison LaCroix, to be held at 12:00 PM (EST) on May 28, 2024, via Zoom.  It will be posted to YouTube following the event.
  

• 
  Jus Gentium is out with a special issue (9:2), The Historicization of International Law and its Limits, organized by Jean d’Aspremont and Thomas Kleinlein.  It includes the article “Lather, Rinse, Repeat: The Historical Returns of International Law,” by Carl Landauer.

• “On May 16, in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, the National Archives in Washington, DC, hosted a panel discussion on the lasting impact of the historic legal decision.”  The panel included Sheryll D. Cashin, Georgetown Law; Randall L. Kennedy, of Harvard Law School; and Michael K. Powell, who moderated.  More.
  

• Also, “Meet all the families behind the 5 school cases that swayed the Supreme Court” (LA School Report).
  

• “Dr. John Kirk, George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History at UA Little Rock, and the students in his fall 2023 Seminar in Public History class, a capstone course that focuses on collaborative research for students who are earning a Master of Arts in public history, have received the Lucille Westbrook Award from the Arkansas Historical Association” for the paper “Racial Discrimination in Jury Selection: The Arkansas Cases of the Bone Brothers, 1938-1940.”  More.
  

• The ABA's Silver Gavel Awards have been announced.  The Book Prize went to Joanna Schwartz for Shielded: How The Police Became Untouchable."  Honorable Mention went to Cliff Sloan for The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made.
  

• The program for the 2024 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association is now online.
  

• ICYMI: Hardeep Dhillon on The Immigration Act of 1924 (Penn Today). "The 'Originalist' Justices Keep Getting History Spectacularly Wrong" (Balls & Strikes).  That "Appeal to Heaven" flag (AP; MSNBC).
  

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Stanley-Ryan on Maori History and International Law

Ash Stanley-Ryan has posted Ka mua, ka Muri: He Whakaputanga, Concealed Indigenous Histories, and the Making of International Law, which is forthcoming in Law&History, the journal of the Australian and New Zealand Legal History Society:

He Whakaputanga

This article examines how our understanding of international law is harmed by the systematic erasure of indigenous experiences and histories. He Whakaputanga o te Rangatira 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 Maori voices and Te Reo Maori, and accepts that history is both political and contingent. In the next section, two parallel histories are detailed: pakeha stories of he whakaputanga as act to secure Imperial interests; and Maori 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 Maori 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’.

--Dan Ernst

Fadel on Classical Muslim International Law

Mohammad Fadel, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published, open access, Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Private International Law in Classical Muslim International Law in the American Journal of Comparative Law:

Scholars in recent years have shown interest in challenging the historical origins of international law and its normative claims to universality. This Article challenges the prevailing conceptions of Islamic international law (al-siyar), first set out in English-language scholarship by Majid Khadduri, as primarily an ad-hoc response to the failed aspiration of a universal Muslim commonwealth. It shows that Islamic international law, in its classical phase (eighth–thirteenth centuries), as first formulated by Iraqi, and later, Central Asian, scholars (who together later came to be known as Hanafis), understood all legal order as being rooted in sovereignty and territoriality, with shared religion a secondary concern. This theory of legal order arose out of an understanding of political order as emerging from a natural and universal condition of war that is incidental to the individual’s natural sovereignty. I trace the genealogy of this conception to the founding moment of the Muslim commonwealth and describe its manifestation in classical Hanafi solutions to a series of cases in “private international law.”

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Grotian Law and Modernity at the Dawn of a New Age

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

Grotian Law and Modernity at the Dawn of a New Age: 400 Years of De jure belli ac pacis, 1625-2025
International Conference, 19-20 June 2025, Leiden University Wijnhaven Campus, The Hague

On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the first publication of De jure belli ac pacis by Hugo Grotius in 1625, an international conference will be organized by the Grotiana Foundation, the Paul Scholten Centre for Jurisprudence at the University of Amsterdam, the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at the University of Leiden and the Department of Public Law and Governance at Tilburg University.

The major aim of the conference is to foster new narratives on the thought of Grotius, in general legal theory as well as in international law against a the backdrop of present-day rapid, fundamental changes that challenge the very foundations of the modernist paradigm, of which Grotius may be considered a key trailblazer. The core question of the academic conference is to what extent Grotian thought about general legal theory and international law is still relevant today, and what adaptations current foundational changes to our world make necessary. In this context, discussion of the many trajectories of reception, appropriation and reinterpretation of Grotius in different times and places, offers a valuable, additional perspective.    

The organizers invite twelve speakers for each of the three thematic parts of the conference.  Candidates are requested to send in an abstract of 250-400 words and short c.v. of max. 100 words to the general convener, Randall Lesaffer (lesaffer@tilburguniversity.edu) by 1 May 2024. Please mention your affiliation and indicate a preference for one of the three conference themes.

Part I ‘Lineages of Grotian Thought’
Convener: Mark Somos
Keynote speaker: Martine van Ittersum

Part II ‘Modernity and the dawn of a new age: general theory of law and
governance’
Convener: Marc de Wilde
Keynote speaker: Annabel Brett

Part III ‘Modernity and the dawn of a new age: international law and governance’
Convener: Eric De Brabandere
Keynote speaker: Hilary Charlesworth

Speakers are expected to turn in a draft paper before 1 June 2025. Papers will be distributed to the participants in advance of the conference. Those papers which pass peer review will be published in both the journal Grotiana (New Series) as well as collected in a separate book with Brill.  More information here.

Weekend Roundup

• Christian R. Burset discusses his book, An Empire of Laws: Legal Pluralism in British Colonial Policy in a New Books Network podcast. Taisu Zhang reviews Professor Burset's article, "Redefining the Rule of Law: An Eighteenth-Century Case Study," on Jotwell.
  

• On April 5, 2024, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and experts for the symposium Permission to Speak Freely? Managing Government Employee Speech in a Democracy, including the historians Sam Lebovic, Sarah Milov, David Rabban, and Ellen Schrecker.

• At Balkinization, Tom Ginsburg on "Ida B. Wells: A Plea for Law and Society Canonization."

• Colorado Law has published a profile of the legal historian Jonathon Booth (Colorado Law).
  

• The editors of European Journal of International Law have published Looking at Portraits by late Karen Kopp, holder of the Cecil A. Wright Chair at the University of Toronto.  Professor Kopp died before she completed a different Foreword for EJIL, and the editors have published this essay instead, which appeared in a collection edited by Immi Tallgren, Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces? (2023).  
  

• The result of the latest election of the Organization of American Historians is in.  Congratulations to President-Elect Annette Gordon-Reed and Vice President Marc Stein.

• Sara Mayeux,Vanderbilt University, appeared in the NPR podcast series Throughline on The Right to An Attorney.
  

• Ray Brescia, Albany Law School, discusses his new book, Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession, on the ABA Journal’s Modern Law Library podcast.
  

• Women’s Rights & Citizenship: A History of Women Jurors, by Helen Allen Nerska (New York Almanack). 
  

• “The latest episode of the A Minute In New York History podcast tells the story of the 1839 La Amistad Rebellion” with the help of Marcus Rediker (New York Almanack).

• From the Law & Political Economy Blog: Etienne C. Toussaint, "Abolitionism as a Question of Citizenship."
  

• Paola Zichi, British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Warwick Law School, present on feminism and “the so-called ‘historical turn’ in international law” in the Law and Methods Seminar at SciencesPo Law School last Thursday.  More.
  

• ICYMI: Black family history and Civil War pension records (NYT).  "Tradition" is "too amorphous and manipulable a criterion” for constitutional adjudication, a federal judge argues (NYT).  John A. Lupton, Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission, on Myra Bradwell (Illinois Courts).
  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.