Global Law Futures Seminar Series: Foreign Affairs, Self-Determination and Private International Law

Edinburgh Law School’s ‘Global Law Futures’ seminar series explores questions relating to global law, broadly construed, from transdisciplinary and diverse methodological perspectives. Law in a plural global context requires a radical re-imagining of the practice, study, and theory of legal orthodoxies. This seminar series questions and attempts to push the boundaries of thinking about law. The series will touch on issues such as the space-time of legal imaginaries, the place of law in times of anthropocentric ecological crisis, the relationalities and materialities of law, what it means to decolonise legal thinking in a global context, the meaning of ‘global legal order(s)’, the relationship between law and algorithmic governance, the exploration of decentralised and deformalised legal practices, and many more besides.  

Beginning in January 2024, the seminar series is convened by Amalia Amaya Navarro, Gail Lythgoe, and Veronica Ruiz Abou-Nigm, collaborating with Nehal Bhuta, Deval Desai, Simone Lamont-Black. The series is supported by the Edinburgh Centre for International Global Law and the Edinburgh Centre for Legal Theory.

 

About the Seminar 

Foreign affairs questions are often thought to lie at the very edge of private international law, perhaps in the leftover corners of the historical alignment between private and public international law. Similarly, in part on the assumption that private international law settles conflicts of laws between already established states, there wouldn’t appear to be any intuitive connection between nationalist or self-determination movements and the field of private international law. 

This lecture shows that these assumptions are mistaken. By engaging with the historical development of the field from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, in this lecture I show that private international law has been deeply enmeshed in major geopolitical events generally, and in nationalist and self-determination movements, in particular. This enmeshment is neither accidental, nor exclusively modern. It is the inevitable result of some of private international law’s main analytical and conceptual building blocks. 

About the Speaker

Roxana Banu is an Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at the Faculty of Law and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the history and theory of private international law. 

She has written on the intellectual history of private international law in the nineteenth century, the relevance of private international law for the geopolitical events of the interwar period, and on the role of social workers in the history of the field. Roxana has recently co-edited the first volume on “Philosophical Foundations of Private International Law” in OUP’s “Philosophical Foundations of Law Series” and is currently working on a book on the history of private international law in the British Empire, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. 

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