• History, Literature, and Authority in International Law

    Author(s):
    Christopher Warren (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    TC Law and the Humanities
    Subject(s):
    Culture and law, Methodology
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    historicism, international law, presentism, critique, anachronism, Law and culture, Interdisciplinary law, Methodologies, Temporality
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6RC61
    Abstract:
    One consequence of international law’s recent historical turn has been to sharpen methodological contrasts between intellectual history and international law. Scholars including Antony Anghie, Anne Orford, Rose Parfitt, and Martti Koskenniemi have taken on board historians’ interest in contingency and context but pointedly relaxed historians’ traditional stricture against presentist instrumentalism. This essay argues that such a move disrupts a longstanding division of labor between history and international law and ultimately brings international legal method closer to literature and literary scholarship. The essay therefore details several more or less endemic ways in which literature and literary studies confront challenges of presentism, anachronism, meaning, and time. Using examples from writers as diverse as Anghie, Spinoza, Geoffrey Hill, Emily St. John Mandel, China Miéville, John Hollander, Pascale Casanova, Matthew Nicholson, John Selden, Shakespeare, and Dante, it proposes a “trilateral” discussion among historians, international lawyers, and literary scholars that takes seriously the multipolar disciplinary field in which each of these disciplines makes and sustains relations with each of the others.  
    Notes:
    Draft of essay forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities, Eds. Maksymilian Del Mar, Bernadette Meyler, and Simon Stern (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
    Metadata:
    xml
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved

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