Monday, May 24, 2021

Essays on Lawyers and International Politics

Here’s a collection of essays we might have missed: Crafting the International Order: Practitioners and Practices of International Law since c.1800, edited by Marcus M. Payk and Kim Christian Priemel (Oxford University Press):

This volume sheds light on how lawyers have made sense of, engaged in, and shaped international politics over the past three hundred years. Chapters show how politicians and administrators, diplomats and military men, have considered their tasks in legal terms, and how the field of international relations has been filled with the distinctly legal vocabulary of laws, regulations, treaties, agreements, and conventions.

Leading experts in the field provide insights into what it means when concrete decisions are taken, negotiations led, or controversies articulated and resolved by legal professionals. They also inquire into how the often-criticised gaps between juristic standards and everyday realities can be explained by looking at the very medium of law. Rather than sorting people and problems into binary categories such as "law" and "politics" or "theory" and "practice," the case studies in this volume reflect on these dichotomies and dissolve them into the messy realities of conflicts and interactions which take place in historically contingent situations, and in which international lawyers assume varying personas.
TOC after the jump. 

–Dan Ernst

1. Introduction: Thinking Law, Talking Law, Doing Law: How Lawyers Craft(ed) the International Order, Marcus M. Payk and Kim Christian Priemel

2. Shaping a New Profession: Japanese Encounters with International Law, c. 1600-1900, Andrew Cobbing

3. Legal Practitioners: Nineteenth Century International Jurisdiction and the Ambiguous Role of the Members of the Mixed Commissions, Fabian Klose

4. Legal Advice, the Foreign Office, and Britain's Neutrality Policy, 1870-1914, Gabriela A. Frei

5. The First R2P: US Legal Advisers and the Right to Protect Citizens in the Early Twentieth Century Americas, Benjamin A. Coates

6. Hammarskjöld at The Hague: Sweden and the Peace Conference of 1907, Michael Jonas

7. The Draughtsmen: International Lawyers and the Crafting of the Paris Peace Treaties, 1919-20, Marcus M. Payk

8. Legal Legwork: How Exiled Jurists Negotiated Recognition and Legitimacy in Wartime London 1939-45, Julia Eichenberg

9. Changing Hats. Nuremberg's Visible College and the Politics of Internationalism, 1941-49, Kim Christian Priemel

10. Fluid Boundaries in the Divisible College: The International Law Association and the Indus Waters Dispute in the 1950s, Katharina Rietzler

11. Agents of Constitutionalism: The Quest for a Constitutional Breakthrough in European Law, 1945-1964, Morten Rasmussen