CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LAW WORKSHOP
presents
Martii Koskenniemi
University of Helsinki
Sovereignty, Property and Empire
Early Modern English Contexts
Friday, February 3, 2017
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (Room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
This text is based on a set of notes from a larger work that seeks to map the uses of different legal vocabularies by ambitious European legal and political thinkers in the period of c. 1300-1800 in order to defend, explain and organize the exercise of power outside the domestic commonwealth. One chapter in that work will concern the ways the English legal languages (civil law, common law, natural law, jus gentium) were used to think about, propagate and defend English transatlantic expansion. For most of that time, the relations of public and private power remained closely interwoven. The pluralism of English law also contributed to arguments from property and sovereignty appearing in different configurations so that it is often hard to figure out which precise connotation is being made. The uses also varied significantly from continental practices. I am above all interested in the imperial or colonial significance of these arguments. The point that emerges here is that by 1800, a conception of British empire had arisen where the exercise of sovereign power was clearly derivative from and supplementary to claims about private property.
This piece has been submitted to the Journal Theoretical Inquiries in Law.
Martti Koskenniemi is Academy Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. He was a member of the Finnish diplomatic service 1978-1994, Judge with the Administrative Tribunal of the Asian Development Bank (1997- 2002) member of the International Law Commission (UN) in 2002-2006. He has worked with several UN agencies and bodies and pleaded with the International Court of Justice. He has held lengthier visiting professorships in, among other places, NYU, Columbia University, University of Cambridge, London School of Economics, and Universities of Brussels, Melbourne, Paris, Sao Paulo and Utrecht. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has a doctorate h.c. from the Universities of Uppsala, Frankfurt and McGill. His main publications include From Apology to Utopia; The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989/2005), The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2001) and The Politics of International Law (2011). He is currently working on a history of international legal thought from the late medieval period to the 19th century.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
