Announcing the Spring 2025 History of International Law Speaker Series

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future is pleased to announce the International History Institute’s (IHI) Spring 2025 “History of International Law” speaker series. All three events will be held in the Pardee School of Global Studies’ Riverside Room at 121 Bay State Road. The series is open to the public. Please register to attend HERE.

Thursday, January 30 | 5:00-6:30 pm | Register to Attend

Keynote Lecture: “The Law of International Society: Remarks on a Domesticated Notion”
Martti Koskenniemi, Professor Emeritus of International Law, University of Helsinki

Koskenniemi argues that, while the notion of “law of international society” arose in the mid-19th century to challenge state-centric thinking about international law, it also encouraged some sociological reflection on the field. It became part of one strand of interwar legal thinking but was finally domesticated in the 1960s and 1970s to express a UN-centered North-Atlantic institutional legalism.

Wednesday, February 26 | 4:00-5:30 pm | Register to Attend

Book Talk: “Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law & the Making of Latin America”
Edward Jones Corredera, Senior Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for
Comparative Public Law and International Law
Discussant: Felipe Ford Cole, Assistant Professor, Boston College Law School

With a focus on the early modern Spanish Empire and modern Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, and based on archival research carried out across seven countries, Edward Jones Corredera’s new book, Odious Debt studies 400 years of history and unearths overlooked congressional debates and understudied thinkers. The book shows how discussions on the morality of debt and default played a structuring role in the construction and codification of national constitutions, identities, and international legal norms in Latin America.

Wednesday, March 26 | 4:00-5:30 pm | Register to Attend

Book Talk: “Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion & the Transformation of International Law”
Allison Powers Useche, Assistant Professor of History, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Discussant: Andrei Mamolea, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University

In her book, Arbitrating Empire, Allison Powers Useche offers a new history of the emergence of the United States as a global power — one shaped as much by attempts to insulate the US government from international legal scrutiny as it was by efforts to project influence across the globe. Drawing on extensive archival research in the United States, Mexico, Panama, and the United Kingdom, the book traces how thousands of dispossessed residents of US-annexed territories petitioned international Claims Commissions between the 1870s and the 1930s to charge the United States with violating international legal protections for life and property. She demonstrates how colonized subjects, refugees from slavery, and migrant workers transformed a series of tribunals designed to establish the legality of US imperial interventions into sites through which to challenge the legitimacy of US colonial governance. One of the first social histories of international law, the book argues that contests over meanings of sovereignty and state responsibility that would reshape the mid-twentieth-century international order were waged not only at diplomatic conferences, but also in Arizona copper mines, Texas cotton fields, Samoan port cities, Cuban sugar plantations, and the locks and stops of the Panama Canal. Arbitrating Empire uncovers how ordinary people used international law to hold the United States accountable for state-sanctioned violence during the decades when the nation was first becoming a global empire — and demonstrates why State Department attempts to erase their claims transformed international law in ways that continue to shield the US government from liability to this day.