Critical Analysis of Law Workshop Series
presents
Arnulf Becker Lorca
Brown University
Watson Institute for International Studies
Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
The development of international law is conventionally understood as a history in which the main characters (states and international lawyers) and events (wars and peace conferences) are European. Mestizo International Law demonstrates how non-Western states and lawyers appropriated nineteenth-century classical thinking in order to defend new and better rules governing non-Western states' international relations. By internalizing the standard of civilization, for example, they argued for the abrogation of unequal treaties. These appropriations contributed to the globalization of international law. With the rise of modern legal thinking and a stronger international community governed by law, peripheral lawyers seized the opportunity and used the new discourse and institutions such as the League of Nations to dissolve the standard of civilization and codify non-intervention and self-determination. These stories suggest that the history of our contemporary international legal order is not purely European; instead they suggest a history of a mestizo international law.
(Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History 1842–1933. Vol. 115. Cambridge University Press, 2014.)
Arnulf Becker Lorca received his SJD from Harvard Law School. His areas of expertise include public international law, laws of war, the history of international law, comparative law and international legal theory. He was a lecturer in public international law at King’s College London and a Pembroke Center Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University. His research traces the global intellectual history of international law focusing on the role non-Western international lawyers have played in the construction of the international legal order between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. His forthcoming book, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History, 1850–1950, will be published in 2012 by Cambridge University Press.
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
