-
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
Downloads
Item Name: history_literature_authority_in_international_law_5_24_18.pdf
Download View in browser Activity: Downloads: 262