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The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future is pleased to announce the International History Institute’s (IHI)<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Keynote Lecture: “The Law of International Society: Remarks on a Domesticated Notion” Koskenniemi argues that, while the notion of \u201claw of international society\u201d 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.<\/em><\/p>\n Martti Koskenniemi is Professor Emeritus of International Law at the University of Helsinki. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has worked as diplomat with the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and was a member of the International Law Commission (UN) in 2002-2006. His main publications include From Apology to Utopia; The Structure of International Legal Argument<\/em> (1989\/2005), The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960<\/em> (2001) and To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power 1300-1870<\/em> (2021). His most recent publication is a joint work with Professor David Kennedy (Harvard), Of Law and the World: Critical Conversations on Power, History and Political Economy<\/em> (2023).<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n Book Talk: “Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law & the Making of Latin America” 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, <\/em>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.<\/em><\/p>\n Edward Jones Corredera is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge in 2020.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n Book Talk: “Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion & the Transformation of International Law” In her book, <\/em>Arbitrating Empire, Allison Powers Useche offers a new history of the emergence of the United States as a global power \u2014 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. <\/em>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 \u2014 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.<\/em><\/p>\n Allison Powers Useche is a legal and political historian of the United States Empire and a social historian of international law. Her research focuses on questions of political economy, legal claims-making, and critiques of state violence. She teaches and advises broadly in histories of the North American West, US Foreign Relations, and international order.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/a>Thursday, January 30 | 5:00-6:30 pm | Register to Attend<\/a><\/h5>\n
\nMartti Koskenniemi<\/a><\/strong><\/a>, Professor Emeritus of International Law, University of Helsinki<\/p>\nSpeaker Bio<\/h5>
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\nWednesday, February 26 | 4:00-5:30 pm | Register to Attend<\/a><\/h5>\n
\nEdward Jones Corredera<\/a><\/strong>, Senior Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for
\nComparative Public Law and International Law
\nDiscussant: Felipe Ford Cole<\/a>, Assistant Professor, Boston College Law School<\/p>\nSpeaker Bio<\/h5>
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\nWednesday, March 26 | 4:00-5:30 pm | Register to Attend<\/a><\/h5>\n
\nAllison Powers Useche<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of History, University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison
\nDiscussant: Andrei Mamolea<\/a>, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University<\/p>\nSpeaker Bio<\/h5>
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