On a hot summer afternoon in 1928, the leaders of the world assembled in Paris to outlaw war. But the promise of that summer day was fleeting. Within a decade of its signing, every signatory state that had gathered in Paris to renounce war was at war.
The Internationalists, published recently by Professor Oona Hathaway and Professor Scott Shapiro and which will be discussed in this talk, tells the story of the Peace Pact by placing it in the long history of international law from the seventeenth century through the present, tracing this rich history through a fascinating and diverse array of lawyers, politicians and intellectuals—Hugo Grotius, Nishi Amane, Salmon Levinson, James Shotwell, Sumner Welles, Carl Schmitt, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Sayyid Qutb. In their book, Hathaway and Shapiro examine with renewed appreciation an international system that has outlawed wars of aggression and brought unprecedented stability to the world map, making the central claim that the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact was the pivotal factor in catalyzing this complex change in international relations. The book's co-author Scott Shapiro will be joined on the panel by experts in the crime of aggression and the use of force to debate the central claims in the book.
Catriona Drew teaches public international law in the School of Law and the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London. She previously taught at the University of Glasgow. Catriona is co-director of the Centre for the study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law at SOAS, and managing editor of the London Review of International Law. Catriona’s most recent publication is Remembering 1948: Who's Afraid of International Legal History in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? in R Gaita & G Simpson (eds), Who's Afraid of International Law? (Monash, 2017). She is currently completing a book, Self-determination: the Untold Story of Population Transfer, to be published by Cambridge University Press.
Scott J. Shapiro is the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School, where he is the Director of the Center for Law and Philosophy. He is also the Visiting Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, London. He earned his BA and PhD degrees in philosophy from Columbia University and a JD from Yale Law School, where he was senior editor of The Yale Law Journal.
Gerry Simpson is Chair in Public International Law at LSE. He previously taught at the University of Melbourne (2007-2015), the Australian National University (1995-1998) and LSE (2000-2007). He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004) and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Polity 2007), and co-editor (with Kevin Jon Heller) of Hidden Histories (Oxford, 2014) and (with Raimond Gaita) of Who’s Afraid of International Law? (Monash, 2017)
Devika Hovell is Associate Professor of Law.
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Podcast
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