Institutions in Motion: Maurice Hauriou and Rethinking the Function of International Organisations

The International Law Reading Group (ILRG) is happy to announce the continuation of its Early Career Research Exchange (ECRE) Series, hosting Matilde Masetti Placci, who is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. The ILRG is looking forward to welcoming Matilde who will be sharing her paper on the function of international organisations with the PGR community of Edinburgh Law School. As the paper is still a work in progress, Matilde is looking forward to discussing and exchanging ideas and comments on her research.

 

The full abstract of Matilde's research could be found below:

The paper explores the potential of using 19th century French theorist Maurice Hauriou’s (1856-1929) legal theory as the basis for a more nuanced analysis of the largest sites of legal production: international organisations.

The paper begins with an outline of his sociolegal methodology, highly influenced by the works of his contemporary and close interlocutor, Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904). Hauriou was interested in how inter-individual communication and relationships emerge and consolidate to produce social facts and, more importantly, social (and eventually legal) organisation. His sociology, which understood temporal and spatial impermanence as the baseline for social life, influenced his highly dynamic account of law. His fluid approach to perspective, wherein social relations could be observed from both outside and within the individuals that composed them, wherein multisubjectivity was a given and inter-individual connections were made and remade over time, was crucial to his legal theory, which revolved around the institution.

An institution concretised a shared idea (the management of an international watercourse, for example) that tied members to each other and provided a structure for members to both consolidate and execute the idea. Where individuals came together to organise socially with a view to executing the idea, institutions would be born, and where institutions existed, so did law. There were as many legal orders as there were institutions. This plurality was bolstered by the social, inter-personal dynamics within and between institutions, which Hauriou consistently described as ‘living things’. It is these dynamics which render institutions flexible, able to adapt in challenging times, yet also susceptible to weaknesses and eventual ‘death’. As institutions were steeped in complex, criss-crossing social dynamics, their legal status was vulnerable to the same forces.
The paper concludes by arguing for the potential utility of bringing Hauriou’s account of the institution to bear on the present, specifically in the context of international organisations. Seeing ‘collective difference’ as the primary form of organisation, Hauriou’s theory gives us an example of how ‘the impossibility of stasis’ is indeed indispensable to understanding how international organisations maintain themselves and adapt to challenges and change over time.