International Law and Empire

International Law and Empire

Author: Martti Koskenniemi

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0198795572

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By examining the relationship between international law and empire from early modernity to the present, this volume improves current understandings of the way international legal institutions, practices, and narratives have shaped imperial ideas about and structures of world governance.


Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition

Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition

Author: Clifford Ando

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-09-14

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 0812204883

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The Romans depicted the civil law as a body of rules crafted through communal deliberation for the purpose of self-government. Yet, as Clifford Ando demonstrates in Law, Language, and Empire in the Roman Tradition, the civil law was also an instrument of empire: many of its most characteristic features developed in response to the challenges posed when the legal system of Rome was deployed to embrace, incorporate, and govern people and cultures far afield. Ando studies the processes through which lawyers at Rome grappled with the legal pluralism resulting from imperial conquests. He focuses primarily on the tools—most prominently analogy and fiction—used to extend the system and enable it to regulate the lives of persons far from the minds of the original legislators, and he traces the central place that philosophy of language came to occupy in Roman legal thought. In the second part of the book Ando examines the relationship between civil, public, and international law. Despite the prominence accorded public and international law in legal theory, it was civil law that provided conceptual resources to those other fields in the Roman tradition. Ultimately it was the civil law's implication in systems of domination outside its own narrow sphere that opened the door to its own subversion. When political turmoil at Rome upended the institutions of political and legislative authority and effectively ended Roman democracy, the concepts and language that the civil law supplied to the project of Republican empire saw their meanings transformed. As a result, forms of domination once exercised by Romans over others were inscribed in the workings of law at Rome, henceforth to be exercised by the Romans over themselves.


Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850

Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850

Author: Lauren Benton

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2013-07-22

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0814708188

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This wide-ranging volume advances our understanding of law and empire in the early modern world. Distinguished contributors expose new dimensions of legal pluralism in the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ottoman empires. In-depth analyses probe such topics as the shifting legal privileges of corporations, the intertwining of religious and legal thought, and the effects of clashing legal authorities on sovereignty and subjecthood. Case studies show how a variety of individuals engage with the law and shape the contours of imperial rule. The volume reaches from Peru to New Zealand to Europe to capture the varieties and continuities of legal pluralism and to probe the analytic power of the concept of legal pluralism in the comparative study of empires. For legal scholars, social scientists, and historians, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 maps new approaches to the study of empires and the global history of law.


A Search for Sovereignty

A Search for Sovereignty

Author: Lauren Benton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-11-30

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1107782716

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A Search for Sovereignty approaches world history by examining the relation of law and geography in European empires between 1400 and 1900. Lauren Benton argues that Europeans imagined imperial space as networks of corridors and enclaves, and that they constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law. Conflicts over treason, piracy, convict transportation, martial law, and crime created irregular spaces of law, while also attaching legal meanings to familiar geographic categories such as rivers, oceans, islands, and mountains. The resulting legal and spatial anomalies influenced debates about imperial constitutions and international law both in the colonies and at home. This study changes our understanding of empire and its legacies and opens new perspectives on the global history of law.


Law Not War

Law Not War

Author: Richard Derecktor Schwartz

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2010-08-03

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1664151338

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Law is an institution that has evolved and flourished through its 6000-year history. Tracing this history in complex societies from the Ancient Middle East to the contemporary world, this book poses the following question: Can international law become an effective instrument of social control among nations in the emerging world society? To develop effective international law will require minimal standards of inclusiveness and mutual responsibility. International law must be limited in its scope, and in its powers. It also must meet the fundamental requirement of an effective legal system: a widespread belief in its justice and fairness. How has that kind of respect for law come about in earlier societies? And how can it be fostered in the evolution of a world legal order?


A Shifting Empire

A Shifting Empire

Author: Uma Suthersanen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2012-11-01

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1781003092

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The 1911 Copyright Act, often termed the 'Imperial Copyright Act', changed the jurisprudential landscape in respect of copyright law, not only in the United Kingdom but also within the then Empire. This book offers a bird's eye perspective of why and how the first global copyright law launched a new order, often termed the 'common law copyright system'. This carefully researched and reflective work draws upon some of the best scholarship from Australia, Canada, India, Israel, Jamaica, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and United Kingdom. The authors – academics and practitioners alike – situate the Imperial Copyright Act 1911 within their national laws, both historically and legally. In doing so, the book queries the extent to which the ethos and legacy of the 1911 Copyright Act remains within indigenous laws. A Shifting Empire offers a unique global, historical view of copyright development and will be a valuable resource for policymakers, academic scholars and members of international copyright associations.


Law’s Empire

Law’s Empire

Author: Ronald Dworkin

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1988-01-01

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 0674736710

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With the incisiveness and lucid style for which he is renowned, Ronald Dworkin has written a masterful explanation of how the Anglo-American legal system works and on what principles it is grounded. Law’s Empire is a full-length presentation of his theory of law that will be studied and debated—by scholars and theorists, by lawyers and judges, by students and political activists—for years to come. Dworkin begins with the question that is at the heart of the whole legal system: in difficult cases how do (and how should) judges decide what the law is? He shows that judges must decide hard cases by interpreting rather than simply applying past legal decisions, and he produces a general theory of what interpretation is—in literature as well as in law—and of when one interpretation is better than others. Every legal interpretation reflects an underlying theory about the general character of law: Dworkin assesses three such theories. One, which has been very influential, takes the law of a community to be only what the established conventions of that community say it is. Another, currently in vogue, assumes that legal practice is best understood as an instrument of society to achieve its goals. Dworkin argues forcefully and persuasively against both these views: he insists that the most fundamental point of law is not to report consensus or provide efficient means to social goals, but to answer the requirement that a political community act in a coherent and principled manner toward all its members. He discusses, in the light of that view, cases at common law, cases arising under statutes, and great constitutional cases in the Supreme Court, and he systematically demonstrates that his concept of political and legal integrity is the key to Anglo-American legal theory and practice.


Legalist Empire

Legalist Empire

Author: Benjamin Allen Coates

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-06-03

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0190495979

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America's empire expanded dramatically following the Spanish-American War of 1898. The United States quickly annexed the Philippines and Puerto Rico, seized control over Cuba and the Panama Canal Zone, and extended political and financial power throughout Latin America. This age of empire, Benjamin Allen Coates argues, was also an age of international law. Justifying America's empire with the language of law and civilization, international lawyers-serving simultaneously as academics, leaders of the legal profession, corporate attorneys, and high-ranking government officials-became central to the conceptualization, conduct, and rationalization of US foreign policy. Just as international law shaped empire, so too did empire shape international law. Legalist Empire shows how the American Society of International Law was animated by the same notions of "civilization" that justified the expansion of empire overseas. Using the private papers and published writings of such figures as Elihu Root, John Bassett Moore, and James Brown Scott, Coates shows how the newly-created international law profession merged European influences with trends in American jurisprudence, while appealing to elite notions of order, reform, and American identity. By projecting an image of the United States as a unique force for law and civilization, legalists reconciled American exceptionalism, empire, and an international rule of law. Under their influence the nation became the world's leading advocate for the creation of an international court. Although the legalist vision of world peace through voluntary adjudication foundered in the interwar period, international lawyers-through their ideas and their presence in halls of power-continue to infuse vital debates about America's global role