Critical Analysis of Law Workshop: Jennifer Pitts

Critical Analysis of Law Workshop Series

presents 

Jennifer Pitts
University of Chicago Political Science 

The Turn to Positivism in International Law?
Vattel and his Nineteenth-Century Reception 

Tuesday, March 1, 2016
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park 

The turn of the nineteenth century is widely seen in histories of international law as a watershed moment, when naturalism gave way to positivism. This paper explores the questions of how, and how significantly, theories of the law of nations changed around the turn of the nineteenth century through a study of Vattel’s Droit des gens of 1758 and its reception in Europe and beyond in subsequent decades. I argue that while Vattel was regarded as the primary authority on the law of nations into the 1830s, and while his account of states as equal and independent nations or peoples exercised great influence well beyond that time, the first Opium War marks an important turning point, when the implications of Vattelian universalism sat so uncomfortably with a dominant political position in a European imperial state that Vattel had to be argued away or dismissed. Vattel came to be regarded among Europeans as an outdated authority in relation to newer sources that insisted on the uniquely European character of the law of nations. 

Jennifer Pitts is Associate Professor of Political Science. She is author of A Turn to Empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton 2005) and editor and translator of Alexis de Tocqueville: writings on empire and slavery (Johns Hopkins 2001). Her research interests lie in the fields of modern political and international thought, particularly British and French thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; empire; the history of international law; and global justice. She is currently at work on a book, tentatively entitledBoundaries of the International, which explores European debates over legal relations with extra-European societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is a co-editor of the Cambridge University Press series Ideas in Context. At the University of Chicago, she is a member of the faculty boards for the Human Rights Program, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and a member of the Women’s Leadership Council.

A light lunch will be provided. 

For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca