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. This volume explores the reasons behind the extraordinary authority of Vattel and analyses its continuing relevance for thinking and understanding contemporary international law.
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.
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.
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.
The Law of Nations and Natural Law 1625-1800 offers innovative studies on the development of the law of nations after the Peace of Westphalia. This period was decisive for the origin and constitution of the discipline which eventually emancipated itself from natural law and became modern international law. A specialist on the law of nations in the Swiss context and on its major figure, Emer de Vattel, Simone Zurbuchen prompted scholars to explore the law of nations in various European contexts. The volume studies little known literature related to the law of nations as an academic discipline, offers novel interpretations of classics in the field, and deconstructs ‘myths’ associated with the law of nations in the Enlightenment.
This collection of essays gathers contributions from leading international lawyers from different countries, generations and angles with the aim of highlighting the multifaceted history of international law. This volume questions and analyses the origins and foundations of the international legal system. A particular attention is devoted to Hugo Grotius as one of the founding fathers of the law of nations. Several contributions further question the positivist tradition initiated by Vattel and endorsed by scholars of the 19th Century. This immersion in the intellectual origins of international law is enriched by an inquiry into the practice of the law of nations, including its main patterns and changing evolution as well as the role of non-western traditions and the impact of colonization. Le présent ouvrage réunit les contributions de juristes internationaux reconnus en vue d’éclairer les multiples facettes de l’histoire du droit international public. L’ouvrage analyse et questionne les origines et les fondements de l’ordre juridique international. Une attention toute particulière est dédiée à Hugo Grotius l’un des pères fondateurs du droit international. D’autres contributions questionnent également la tradition positiviste initiée par Vattel et confortée par la doctrine du 19ème siècle. Cette immersion dans les origines doctrinales du système juridique international est enrichie par l’étude de la pratique du droit international public, son évolution ainsi que le rôle des traditions non-occidentales et l’impact de la colonisation.
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'.
In Jus Post Bellum, Jens Iverson provides for the first time the Just War foundations of the concept, reveals the function of jus post bellum, and integrates the law that governs the transition from armed conflict to peace.
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.
