POSTPONED - Book Launch: To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth - Martti Koskenniemi
Location:
Date/time
Fri 19 November 2021
This event has been postponed to a later date
The Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law presents
To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth
Legal Imagination and International Power 1300-1870
Professor Martti Antero Koskenniemi, Professor of International Law in the University of Helsinki and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights
About the book
To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth shows the vital role played by legal imagination in the formation of the international order during 1300–1870. It discusses how European statehood arose during early modernity as a locally specific combination of ideas about sovereign power and property rights, and how those ideas expanded to structure the formation of European empires and consolidate modern international relations. By connecting the development of legal thinking with the history of political thought and by showing the gradual rise of economic analysis into predominance, the author argues that legal ideas from different European legal systems - Spanish, French, English and German - have played a prominent role in the history of global power. This history has emerged in imaginative ways to combine public and private power, sovereignty and property. The book will appeal to readers crossing conventional limits between international law, international relations, history of political thought, jurisprudence and legal history.
About the speaker
Martti Koskenniemi is Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. He was a member of the Finnish diplomatic service 1978-1994, Judge with the Administrative Tribunal of the Asian Development Bank (1997- 2002) member of the International Law Commission (UN) in 2002-2006.
He has worked with several UN agencies and bodies and pleaded with the International Court of Justice. He has held lengthier visiting professorships in, among other places, NYU, Columbia University, University of Cambridge, London School of Economics, Melbourne University and Universities of Brussels, Paris, Sao Paulo and Utrecht. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has a doctorate h.c. from the Universities of Uppsala, Frankfurt and McGill. His main publications include From Apology to Utopia; The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989/2005), The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2001) and The Politics of International Law (2011). His latest work on the (pre-)history of international law is To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power (2021)