Legal History as Foreign Relations History

I've just posted a new paper, Legal History as Foreign Relations History. Written for the new edition of a leading work on methodology in foreign relations history, I challenge the field's traditional skepticism about law's relevance to international affairs. Many grad students and newer scholars are incorporating the history of human rights and international law into their work, and my intent is to be helpful to those historians, and to build a bridge between fields.  Here's the abstract:

This paper is for a leading work on the methodologies of foreign relations history. Traditionally, diplomatic historians have been skeptical about law as a causal force in international relations, and have often ignored it. Challenging that assumption, this essay shows that law is already present in aspects of foreign relations history scholarship. Using human rights as an example, I explore the way periodization of legal histories is tied to assumptions and arguments about causality. I illustrate the way law has worked as a tool in international affairs, and the way law makes an indelible mark, or acts as a legitimizing force, affecting what historical actors imagine to be possible. Drawing from Robert Gordon’s influential work on the methodology of legal history, the essay shows the way law can help to constitute the social and political context within which international affairs are conducted. I argue that the presence of law and lawyers in the history of U.S. foreign relations is too central to be ignored.

For a scholar without legal training, taking up law-related topics can pose special challenges. This essay ends with a Legal History Survival Guide that includes advice about how to get started and how to avoid mistakes.

Legal History Survival Guide, part 2: bibliographies on law in foreign relations history

For my essay on legal history as diplomatic history, which includes tips for the uninitiated, I have this list of good bibliographic sources. Can you add to it?

Researchers will find very helpful bibliographies and bibliographic essays in Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations; Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights; Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia; Stephen C. Neff, Justice Among Nations and A.W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention. See also extensive and helpful citations in the notes of George Athan Billias, American Constitutionalism Heard Round the World; Stephen M. Griffin, Long Wars and the Constitution; and Mariah Ziesberg, War Powers: The Politics of Constitutional Authority. International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court, edited by David L. Sloss, Michael D. Ramsey and William S. Dodge; and the five volume Encyclopedia of Human Rights, edited by David P. Forsythe, are also excellent references. The best source for access to legal documents relating to law and diplomatic history is The Avalon Project Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, hosted by the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School.

The Erosion of War and Peace in International Law

From the AALS Panel on The Concept of Peace in Law, Culture and Society:

International Law Beyond War and Peace

RutiTeitel, Straus Fellow, NYU Law School (2012-2013); Ernst C. Stiefel Prof of Comparative Law, NY Law School

In general, in international law, the distinction between the state of war and the state of peace is becoming less relevant, or at least less determinative of the applicable legal norms. This produces new challenges of interpretation and new trade offs in the relation between law and politics.

Teitel, Humanity's Law

The following are three illustrations of what has been happening.

1. First is the question of when does international criminal justice come into the picture?  At Nuremberg, international criminal responsibility was conceived as fundamentally part of ius post bellum, something that occurs at the end of hostilities.  In a way, it took the place of the kind of collective punishment that became questionable in the wake of the Versaille Treaty.

Today international criminal justice has a transformed functionality, coming into play during conflict, before the peace, and even ex ante (the case of Libya, where referrals to the ICC preceded military intervention in the conflict); indeed it is used as means of regulating conflict itself. We don't need to know whether conflict has ended.

This began with the Balkans war where the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was created during the conflict by the Security Council and where its jurisdiction to create a tribunal was its peacemaking powers under the UN Charter chapter 7, and where the very stated aim of the law is to regulate the conflict and to restore the peace. Since then this has been reiterated in the ICC Statute.

The introduction of international criminal law during conflict raises the peace versus justice dilemma. What if the prospect of criminal justice intensifies the conflict or makes peace negotiations more difficult (e.g. Quaddaffi in Libya?)? The flip side is the politicization of law, where criminal prosecutions or the threat of them is used to achieve specific strategic political objectives such as may well have been the case vis avis Milosevic’s indictment at the time of the Dayton negotiations.

The second illustration is that it is now rather well established that international human rights law does not apply only in peacetime.

Continue reading below the fold.