CFP: Legal History and Mass Migration

[We have the following call for papers.  DRE]

Legal Response to Mass Migration Between the 19th Century and the WWII 

Confronted with mass migration, since the mid-19th century Western legal culture was forced to face migrants not just as a sum of individuals, but as a phenomenon demanding new legal concepts and mechanisms appropriate to govern and regulate groups and collective subjects. European migrants moving towards colonies and the East led to a reconceptualization of traditional international law doctrines on state sovereignty in order to de-territorialize Western citizens who occurred to be in the Eastern countries, freeing them from the imperium of the local authority and entrusting them to their own consular courts. Whereas immigration into Western countries led to the adoption of protective legal strategies and exclusion mechanisms to bar the dangerous others, emigration of European citizens towards colonized regions and Eastern countries prompted the elaboration of exceptional safeguards and privileges for ‘civilizing’ migrants. The new challenges of mobility led jurists and legislators to reshape the peculiarity of ius migrandi through terminological as well as conceptual revisions (e.g. the notions of citizenship, sovereignty, territorial state, undesirable and dangerous alien), the elaboration of new disciplines such as international labor law and international migration law, and the creation of special administrative bodies or jurisdictions (e.g. immigration officers; board of inspectors; consular courts; inspectors of emigration; arbitral commissions for emigration).

The Legal History and Mass Migration project (PRIN 2017) invites proposals for papers relating to the theme of the juridical response to mass migration between the mid-19th century and WWII. Papers can be based on different methodologies and may refer to a broad variety of subjects, including, by way of example:

• application of methodologies such as global legal history, comparative legal history, critical analysis of law to the study of migration issues;

• relationship between local rules and international migration law;

• tensions between human rights’ recognition and border control policies;

• non-Western legal approaches to migration issues;

• construction of legal discourses, theories, justifications to support, contrast, govern, or limit mass migration;
  

• models of citizenship and integration or exclusion of alien immigrants in different countries;

• role of case law and/or resort to special tribunals with jurisdiction in migration issues as means of departing from ordinary rules and constitutional protections;
  

• institutional and informal mechanisms (such as ‘soft law’, role of unions or charitable institutions, nets of assistance of national citizens abroad etc.) adopted to deal with mass migration problems in different countries of both departure and destination;

• impact of mass migration on national and international labour law;

• racial paradigms and immigration laws;
  

• local/global economic impact of migration and its legal regulation;

• exploitation of criminal law concepts, discourses, practices to stir the public conviction about the social danger of mass migration

Proposals for papers are due by 30 March 2021 and should be submitted by e-mail at legalhistoryandmassmigration@gmail.com in Word format, following this order: (a) author(s); (b) affiliation; (c) e-mail address; (d) title of abstract; (e) body of abstract (apx 350 words).  Accepted papers will be presented at an international conference which will be held at the University of Naples in December 2021.  

Support for selected participants: funding for travel expenses and accommodation may be available. Please indicate with your paper proposal if you would like to be considered for a support, and if so, your expected expenses. All funding decisions will be made independently of paper acceptance.
Papers and pre-circulation: Please note that the conference panels will be structured around a short summary of speakers’ pre-circulated papers, followed by more extended discussion. It is our intention that accepted speakers will submit papers of no more than 4,000 words for circulation by Friday 22 October 2021.

For general inquiries, please email: info@legalhistoryandmassmigration.com

Conference Committee: Luigi Nuzzo (University of Salento), Michele Pifferi (University of Ferrara), Giuseppe Speciale (University of Catania), Cristina Vano (University of Naples Federico II).

Giovanopoulou on Pragmatic Liberalism and US Foreign Policy

Afroditi Giovanopoulou, a doctoral candidate, Columbia University, has posted Pragmatic Legalism: Revisiting America's Order after World War II, which is forthcoming in the Harvard International Law Journal 62 (2021):

How should we think about the role of law in the making of American foreign policy? Scholarly accounts typically emphasize that the United States led the way for the establishment of a legalized international order at the end of World War II, centered around the norms of international human rights and those of the law of war. More recently, historians have argued that, in fact, a much more skeptical attitude towards international law prevailed in the postwar period. This was in large part due to the reigning influence of international relations realism in the postwar foreign policy establishment. This article argues that postwar foreign policy was defined neither by an unyielding fidelity to a norms-based international order nor enduring realist dismissal of this project. Rather, what defined the postwar period was an eclectic, variegated and situational approach to law and regulation: a mode of “pragmatic” legalism. Pragmatic legalism consciously developed as a reaction to the legal sensibilities of prewar foreign policy makers, who promoted the codification of international norms and the judicial resolution of international disputes. It also developed as a result of larger transformations in American legal thought, notably the rise of sociological jurisprudence and legal realism. Uncovering the history of pragmatic legalism produces significant consequences for how we understand the past and present of American foreign policy. It suggests that there was not a singular law-centric mode that prevailed among American foreign policy makers over the course of the twentieth century, as has been frequently assumed. The vocabulary of pragmatic legalism also shows the breadth of alternative possibilities for lawyers anxious for ways forward today. Today, a legal approach reminiscent of the tradition of international relations realism is vying to displace the previously moralizing language of American foreign policy. Neither of these two competing modes- moralizing internationalism or skeptical disengagement- is the inevitable future of American foreign policy, or American legal internationalism more broadly.

--Dan Ernst

Siegelberg in the Washington History Seminar

The next Washington History Seminar Panel is with Mira Siegelberg, Cambridge University, on her book Statelessness: A Modern History, with a comment by LHB Founder Mary L. Dudziak, Emory University.  It takes place Monday, December 7 at 4:00 pm ET.  Register here.  It may be viewed on the National History Center’s Facebook Page or the Wilson Center website.

Two world wars left millions stranded in Europe. The collapse of empires and the rise of independent states in the twentieth century produced an unprecedented number of people without national belonging and with nowhere to go. Following a generation of theorists and practitioners who took up the problem of mass statelessness, Siegelberg weaves together a history of ideas of law and politics, rights and citizenship, with the intimate plight of stateless persons. Drawing on extensive archival research and an innovative approach to the history of international order, Siegelberg explores how and why the rise and fall of statelessness in modern thought compels a new understanding of the historical relationship between states and citizens, empires and states, and of the legitimation of the territorial state against alternative forms of political organization in the twentieth century.

–Dan Ernst

Soares Pereira and Ridi on the "Invisible College of International Lawyers"

Luiza Leão Soares Pereira, University of Cambridge, and Niccolò Ridi, University of Liverpool, have posted Mapping the "Invisible College of International Lawyers" through Obituaries, which is forthcoming in the Leiden Journal of International Law

Since Oscar Schachter’s famous articulation of the concept, scholars have attempted to know more about the composition and functioning of the ‘invisible college of international lawyers’ which makes up our profession. They have done this though surveying public rosters of certain sections of the profession (arbitrators, International Court of Justice counsel), providing general anecdotal accounts about informal connections between members, or establishing certain individuals’ influence in the development of discrete legal concepts. Departing from these approaches, we use the obituaries published in the British Yearbook of International Law (1920-2017) to draw a map of the ‘invisible college of international lawyers’. Obituaries are a unique window into international law’s otherwise private inner life, unveiling professional connections between international lawyers and their shared career paths beyond a single academic or judicial institution. Employing network analysis, a method commonly used in social sciences to describe complex social phenomena such as this, we are able to demonstrate the ubiquity of informal networks whereby ideas move, and provide evidence of the community’s homogeneity. Exploring the connections between international lawyers and their shared characteristics in this novel way, we shed light on the features of the community and the impact individual personalities have on the law. These characteristics of the profession and its members may be obvious to insiders, but are seldom acknowledged. Graphic representation is a powerful tool in bolstering critiques for diversity and contestation of mainstream law-making narratives. More than an exercise in exhaustive mapping, we seek to take the ‘dead white men’ trope to an extreme, provoking the reader to question the self-image of the profession as an impersonal expert science.

--Dan Ernst.  H/t: JFW

Hirsch's "Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg" at WHS

The next meeting of the Washington History Seminar will be devoted to Francine Hirsch, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her book, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II.  It will be held on Thursday, November 12 at 4:00 pm ET.  Click here to register.

Organized in the wake of World War Two by the victorious Allies, the Nuremberg Trials were intended to hold the Nazis to account for their crimes and to restore a sense of justice to a world devastated by violence. As Francine Hirsch reveals in her groundbreaking new book, a major piece of the Nuremberg story has routinely been left out: the critical role of the Soviet Union. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers a startlingly new view of the International Military Tribunal and a fresh perspective on the movement for international human rights that it helped launch.

--Dan Ernst

Zhu on China Suzerainty over Tibet and Mongolia

Yuan Yi Zhu, Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at Pembroke College, Oxford, has published Suzerainty, Semi-Sovereignty, and International Legal Hierarchies on China's Borderlands, in the Asian Journal of International Law:

The concept of semi-sovereignty, a now obsolete category of international entities possessing limited sovereignty, remains hazily understood. However, the historical examination of how semi-sovereignty was defined and practised during the long nineteenth century can provide insights on the interplay between authority and control within the hierarchies of international relations. This paper examines one specific type of semi-sovereignty—namely, suzerainty—which is often used to describe China's traditional authority in Tibet and Mongolia. By examining the events that led to the acceptance of suzerainty as the legal framing for the China-Tibet and China-Mongolia relationships, I argue that suzerainty was a deliberately vague concept that could be used to create liminal international legal spaces to the advantage of Western states, and to mediate between competing claims of political authority. Finally, I point to the importance of semi-sovereignty as an arena of legal contestation between the Western and non-Western members of the “Family of Nations”.

Update: With the new link above, the article is ungated.

–Dan Ernst

A Lost World? Jewish International Lawyers and New World Orders

[We have the following announcement.  The full--and footnoted--call is here.  DRE]

 Call for proposals: A Lost World?: Jewish International Lawyers and New World Orders (1917-1951)

The International Law Forum of the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem together with the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture –Simon Dubnow, at Leipzig and the Jacob Robinson Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are inviting proposals for papers to be presented at an international conference to be held mostly or partly online on 24-25 May 2021 (depending on the prevailing public health conditions). The conference will include invited speakers and other participants.

Theme.  The first half of the 20th century featured two dramatic attempts to construct New World Orders following the two World Wars. These attempts included the establishment of ambitious international governance frameworks in the form of the League of Nations, the Permanent Court of International Justice and the International Labor Organization after the First World War and the United Nations Organization, the International Court of Justice and the Bretton Woods System after the Second World War. In parallel with these developments, landmark agreements were reached resulting in a radical transformation of the Westphalian state system, and, in particular, with regard to the relationship between states, individuals and groups. These agreements included other major instruments such as the post-World War One minority treaties, the Slavery Convention (1926), the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), the Geneva Conventions of 1929 and 1949, the London Charter (1945), the Genocide Convention (1948), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Refugees Convention (1951). It can be argued that the norms and institutions established in this dramatic period revolutionized international law in diverse fields, ranging from international human rights law, through international criminal law and international humanitarian law, to international economic law.

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in historical research describing the unique contribution of prominent Jewish international lawyers to the development of modern international law. Among the prominent publications belonging to this genre one can mention Philippe Sands’ East West Street, focusing on the life and work of Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht (2017), Gilad Ben-Nun’s book on the Fourth Geneva Convention which highlights the contribution of Georg Cohn, Georges Cahen-Salvador and Nissim Mevorah (2020), James Leoffler and Moria Paz’s edited volume on the Law of Strangers (2019), James Loeffler’s Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (2018), Nathan Kurz’s, Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust (2020) and Rotem Giladi’s publications on Israel and the Refugees and Genocide Convention (2015). A number of earlier works also touched upon multiple dimensions of the topic, including the contributions of prominent Jewish international lawyers, such as Hans Kelsen and Jacob Robinson, and on the relationship between the experience of being uprooted and interest in international law.

The conference seeks to invite lawyers, historian and academics from other relevant disciplines to take stock of this growing literature, that analyzes the contribution of Jewish international lawyers to the major developments in international law noted above, and to address the following questions: Can one truly speak of a “Jewish school” in international law? Or can one allude to a number of “Jewish schools” speaking in different voices? Can the contributions of Jewish international lawyers be distinguished from other contemporary trends shaped by migration and/or attachment to cosmopolitan ideals? If so, what are the main contours of this Jewish school(s)? How is it related to Jewish thought and experience generally or to the collective interests of the Jewish people in the relevant period? Does anything remain of this tradition in the 21st century? Has this tradition affected the approach to international law of Israel and international Jewish institutions? To what extent does the categorization of certain authors as “Jewish” do injustice to their own self identification as individuals or as nationals of specific countries? To what extent has the Jewish stance(s) toward international law changed since the creation of the State of Israel (and to what extent is there a Jewish-Israeli School (or schools) that are distinct from the Jewish school(s))? In particular, how may these questions be related to what some have seen as Israel’s skeptical stance towards many of the universal or cosmopolitan values articulated in the post-World War eras. Finally, can any contemporary lessons be drawn from this phenomenon and, if so, what are they?

Understanding the historic experience represented by the contribution of Jewish international lawyers in the period in question may also help researchers better understand contemporary attitudes towards international law as well as the feasibility of changing them.

The Call.  Researchers interested in addressing issues related to the themes of the conference are invited to respond to this call for papers with a 1-2-page proposal for an article and presentation, along with a brief CV. Proposals should be submitted by email to Mr. Tal Mimran, the coordinator of the International Law Forum (tal.mimran@mail.huji.ac.il) no later than 15 November 2020. Applicants should be notified of the committee's decision by 15 December 2020. Written contributions (of approx. 10-25 pages) based on the selected proposals should be submitted by 1  May 2021. The Israel Law Review (a Cambridge University Press publication) has expressed interest in publishing selected full length papers based on conference presentations, subject to its standard review and editing procedures.

Conference Academic Committee:
Eyal Benvenisti, Cambridge University/Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tomer Broude, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dan Diner, Jabob Robinson Institute, Hebrew University
Elisabeth Gallas, Dubnow Institute
Rotem Giladi, Dubnow Institute
Philipp Graf, Dubnow Institute
Guy Harpaz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Moshe Hirsch, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yaël Ronen, Israel Law Review, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yuval Shany, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Malcolm Shaw, Essex Court Chambers/Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yfaat Weiss, Dubnow Institute

Siegert on State Liability in the First World War

[We have the following book announcement from our friends at Max Planck.  DRE]

The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History just published a new volume in its book series Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte: Philipp Siegert, Staatshaftung im Ausnahmezustand: Doktrin und Rechtspraxis im Deutschen Reich und in Frankreich, 1914-1919.

The First World War is sometimes called the 20th century's "primordial catastophe." It raised diverse legal questions and led to a host of fundamental changes. In volume 322 of the MPIeR's book series Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte, which has just been published, Philipp Siegert examines state liability law in Germany and France between 1914 and 1918. On the basis of a detailed analysis of both French and German archival sources, he analyses states' legal responsibility during such a state of emergency and identifies categories of "legitimate" and "illegitimate" state action that, however, were either non-existent in pre-war international law or even contradicted it. Nevertheless, these were subsequently sanctioned by the peace treaties, and even a century after 1919 remain part of the international order. The ways in which destruction, expropriation and economic war measures carried out by France and Germany were assessed and sanctioned is highly instructive for the question of state liability in international law today.

Benvenisti & Lustig, "Monopolizing War: Codifying the Laws of War to Reassert Governmental Authority, 1856–1874"

The February 2020 issue of the European Journal of International Law includes an article that may be of interest to readers: "Monopolizing War: Codifying the Laws of War to Reassert Governmental Authority, 1856–1874," by Eyal Benvenisti (University of Cambridge/Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Doreen Lustig (Tel Aviv University). Here's the abstract:

In this article, we challenge the canonical narrative about civil society’s efforts to discipline warfare during the mid-19th century – a narrative of progressive evolution of Enlightenment-inspired laws of war, later to be termed international humanitarian law. Conversely, our historical account shows how the debate over participation in international law-making and the content of the law reflected social and political tensions within and between European states. While the multifaceted influence of civil society was an important catalyst for the inter-governmental codification of the laws of war, the content of that codification did not simply reflect humanitarian sensibilities. Rather, as civil society posed a threat to the governmental monopoly over the regulation of war, the turn to inter-state codification of IHL also assisted governments in securing their authority as the sole regulators in the international terrain. We argue that, in codifying the laws of war, the main concern of key European governments was not to protect civilians from combatants’ fire, but rather to protect combatants from civilians eager to take up arms to defend their nation – even against their own governments’ wishes. We further argue that the concern with placing ‘a gun on the shoulder of every socialist’ extended far beyond the battlefield. Monarchs and emperors turned to international law to put the dreaded nationalist and revolutionary genies back in the bottle. These concerns were brought to the fore most forcefully in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and the subsequent short-lived, but violent, rise of the Paris Commune. These events formed the backdrop to the Brussels Declaration of 1874, the first comprehensive text on the laws of war. This Declaration exposed civilians to war’s harms and supported the growing capitalist economy by ensuring that market interests would be protected from the scourge of war and the consequences of defeat.

The full article is gated, unfortunately.
-- Karen Tani