When: Wednesday, February 8, 2023, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PMWhere: Online or Room 2.10, School of Law, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS (via Westfield Way)
This event is followed by a drinks reception.
In this lecture, Professor Martti Koskenniemi (University of Helsinki) will present his latest 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.
This event is hosted by the Centre for European and International Legal Affairs and co-hosted with Sheffield Centre for International and European Law. The discussant will be Professor Nicholas Tsagourias, The University of Sheffield.
Martti Koskenniemi is Emeritus 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).
Nicholas Tsagourias is Professor of International Law at the University of Sheffield. His research interests are in the fields of international law and the use of force, international humanitarian law, international criminal law, collective security law, peacekeeping, United Nations Law, international and European constitutional theory and law and he is widely published in these fields.
Professor Tsagourias also sits on the editorial board for the Journal of Conflict and Security Law and for the Journal on the Use of Force and International Law. He is the convenor of the European Society of International Law Interest Group on Peace and Security and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. He also holds a visiting post at the University of Umea, Sweden.