Prof Nehal Bhuta publishes CLP article on 'The State Theory of Grotius'

A new publication by Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law (ECIGL) director Nehal Bhuta, argues that Grotius has a modern theory of the state that can take its place alongside Bodin and Hobbes as one of the ways in which early modern civil philosophy sought to solve the problem of the authority and validity of political order.

The article titled 'The State Theory of Grotius' was published on 9 January 2021 by Oxford Academic, and is the latest entry in the Current Legal Problems (CLP) journal series. The CLP annual volume is published on behalf of University College London, Faculty of Laws. CLP features scholarly articles that offer a critical analysis of important current legal issues. It covers all areas of legal scholarship and features a wide range of methodological approaches to law. With its emphasis on contemporary developments, CLP is a major point of reference for legal scholarship.

'The State Theory of Grotius' explores Grotius’s account of the state, which draws a picture of the relationship between political and legal ordering, and history, in which the interrelationship of the political and the legal allows a range of adaptive and adaptable state-forms. State authority is made possible and accountable under a system of natural legal right, even as its constitution is a historical achievement that should not readily be disturbed and in which a large range of freedom and unfreedom is lawful and should be accepted.

In the article, Nehal Bhuta argues that understood in this way, the State Theory of Grotius is not only modern, but provides in its methods and insights, a potential answer to one of the key conceptual dead ends of modern theories of sovereignty: the idea that sovereign power must be perpetually concentrated in one organ or entity if it is to retain what makes it sovereign. Nehal highlights the significance of state theory for contemporary discussions of international, transnational and global law.

Read article: 'The State Theory of Grotius' can be accessed via the Oxford Academic advanced article abstract.