Vattel's International Law from a XXIst Century Perspective / Le Droit International de Vattel vu du XXIe Siècle


Book Description

No other scholar has so deeply influenced the development of international law or shaped the doctrinal debates as Vattel. More than 250 years after its publication, his Law of Nations has remained the most frequently quoted treatise of international law. Vattel's International Law from a XXIst Century Perspective explores the reasons behind the extraordinary authority of Vattel and analyses its continuing relevance for thinking and understanding contemporary international law. It gathers the contributions from well-known experts of international law and history for the purpose of evaluating the Law of Nations from a XXIst century perspective. The multiple facets of Vattel’s thinking are apprehended through a wide-ranging and comprehensive analysis respectively devoted to the international system, the sources of international law, the subjects of international law, the law of peace, and the law of war.




Concepts and Contexts of Vattel's Political and Legal Thought


Book Description

Explores how Vattel used the natural law tradition to frame a pragmatic and treaty-oriented model of the law of nations.




The Invention of Custom


Book Description

The concept of customary international law, although differently formulated, is already present in early modern European debates on natural law and the law of nations. However, no scholarly monograph has, until now, addressed the relationship between custom and the European natural law and ius gentium tradition. This book tells that neglected story, and offers a solid conceptual framework to contextualize and understand the 'problematic of custom', namely how to identify its normative content. Natural law doctrines, and the different ways in which they help construct human reason, provided custom with such normative content. This normative content consists of a set of fundamental moral values that help identify the status of custom as either a fundamental feature or an original source of ius gentium. This book explores what cultural values and practices facilitated the emergence of custom and rendered it into as a source of the law of nations, and how they did so. Two crucial issues form the core of the book's analysis. Firstly, it qualifies the nature of the interrelation between natural law and ius gentium, explaining why it matters in relation to our understanding of the idea of custom. Second, the book claims that the process of custom formation as a source of law calls into question the role of the authority of history. The interpretation of the past through this approach can thus be described as one of 'invention'.




The Legacy of Vattel's Droit des gens


Book Description

This edited collection offers a reassessment of the complicated legacy of Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens, first published in 1758. One of the most influential books in the history of international law and a major reference point in the fields of international relations theory and political thought, this book played a role in the transformation of diplomatic practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. But how did Vattel’s legacy take shape? The volume argues that the enduring relevance of Vattel’s Droit des gens cannot be explained in terms of doctrines and academic disciplines that formed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, the chapters show how the complex reception of this book took shape historically and why it had such a wide geographical and disciplinary appeal until well into the twentieth century. The volume charts its reception through translations, intellectual, ideological and political appropriations as well as new practical usages, and explores Vattel’s discursive and conceptual innovations. Drawing on a wide range of sources, such as archive memoranda and diplomatic correspondences, this volume offers new perspectives on the book’s historical contexts and cultures of reception, moving past the usual approach of focusing primarily on the text. In doing so, this edited collection forms a major contribution to this new direction of study in intellectual history in general and Vattel’s Droit des gens in particular.




Philosophical Foundations of International Criminal Law


Book Description

This first edition of Philosophical Foundations of International Criminal Law: Correlating Thinkers contains 20 chapters about renowned thinkers from Plato to Foucault. As the first volume in the series "Philosophical Foundations of International Criminal Law", the book identifies leading philosophers and thinkers in the history of philosophy or ideas whose writings bear on the foundations of the discipline of international criminal law, and then correlates their writings with international criminal law.




Making Migration Law


Book Description

The emergence of international human rights law and the end of the White Australia immigration policy were events of great historical moment. Yet, they were not harbingers of a new dawn in migration law. This book argues that this is because migration law in Australia is best understood as part of a longer jurisprudential tradition in which certain political-economic interests have shaped the relationship between the foreigner and the sovereign. Eve Lester explores how this relationship has been wrought by a political-economic desire to regulate race and labour; a desire that has produced the claim that there exists an absolute sovereign right to exclude or condition the entry and stay of foreigners. Lester calls this putative right a discourse of 'absolute sovereignty'. She argues that 'absolute sovereignty' talk continues to be a driver of migration lawmaking, shaping the foreigner-sovereign relation and making thinkable some of the world's harshest asylum policies.




The Aims and Methods of Postcolonial International Law


Book Description

Criticism of colonial justifications has been familiar since the age of Sepúlveda and Las Casas. Yet today it is said that international law is, and always was, an instrument of colonialism. It is true that the ius gentium and the Law of Nations failed to prevent colonialism and were used in fact to justify colonialism. Still, such failures which occurred over the successive periods of European colonization of non-European peoples did not implicate the whole of international law thought. That is just a modern exaggeration, but rather than repair the international law that we have, for example in our discussions about colonial reparation, some now wish us to reject international law altogether. In seeking to cast present-day criticisms in a proper light, these lectures at the Hague Academy had discussed the more notable literature, including in judgments and arbitral awards, from the time of the classic works that are connected to the history of the subject to the present day. Now presented in pocketbook form the objective is the same; which is to explain the aims and methods of post-colonial criticism, and to reject the view that it is too late for international law.




Emer de Vattel and the Politics of Good Government


Book Description

This book explores the history of the international order in the eighteenth and nineteenth century through a new study of Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens (1758). Drawing on unpublished sources from European archives and libraries, the book offers an in-depth account of the reception of Vattel’s chief work. Vattel’s focus on the myth of good government became a strong argument for republicanism, the survival of small states, drafting constitutions and reform projects and fighting everyday battles for freedom in different geographical, linguistic and social contexts. The book complicates the picture of Vattel’s enduring success and usefulness, showing too how the work was published and translated to criticize and denounce the dangerousness of these ideas. In doing so, it opens up new avenues of research beyond histories of international law, political and economic thought.




International Law and Peace Settlements


Book Description

International Law and Peace Settlements provides a systematic and comprehensive assessment of the relationship between international law and peace settlement practice across core settlement issues, e.g. transitional justice, human rights, refugees, self-determination, power-sharing, and wealth-sharing. The contributions address key cross-cutting questions on the legal status of peace agreements, the potential for developing international law, and the role of key actors – such as non-state armed groups, third-state witnesses and guarantors, and the UN Security Council – in the legalisation and internationalisation of settlement commitments. In recent years, significant scholarly work has examined facets of the relationship between international law and peace settlements, through concepts such as jus post bellum and lex pacificatoria. International Law and Peace Settlements drives forward the debate on the legalisation and internationalisation of peace agreements with diverse contributions from leading academics and practitioners in international law and conflict resolution.




System, Order, and International Law


Book Description

For many centuries, thinkers have tried to understand and to conceptualize political and legal order beyond the boundaries of sovereign territories. Their concepts, deeply entangled with ideas of theology, state formation, and human nature, form the bedrock of today's theoretical discourses on international law. This volume engages with models of early international legal thought from Machiavelli to Hegel before international law in the modern sense became an academic discipline of its own. The interplay of system and order serves as a leitmotiv throughout the book, helping to link historical models to contemporary discourse. Part I of the book covers a diverse collection of thinkers in order to scrutinize and contextualize their respective models of the international realm in light of general legal and political philosophy. Part II maps the historical development of international legal thought more generally by distilling common themes and ideas, such as the relationship between universality and particularity, the role of the state, the influence of power and economic interests on the law, and the contingencies of time, space and technical opportunities. In the current political climate, where it appears that the reinvigorated concept of the nation state as an ordering force competes with internationalist thinking, the problems at issue in the classic theories point to contemporary questions: is an international system without central power possible? How can a normative order come about if there is no central force to order relations between states? These essays show that uncovering the history of international law can offer ways in which to envisage its future.