Melbourne Law School - Research Publications
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ItemWhat is the History of International Law For?(Informa UK Limited, 2023-01-01)
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ItemRegional Orders, Geopolitics, and the Future of International Law(OXFORD UNIV PRESS, 2021)Abstract This article argues that the old international law of empires, greater spaces, and regional orders did not disappear with the creation of the United Nations. While revisionist histories of international law have complicated the claim that a Westphalian order of independent states completely replaced a world of more varied political forms in the mid-seventeenth century, international lawyers nonetheless largely accept that such a transformation did take place at some point. The state is treated as the normative political subject of international law, and any move away from the geography of statehood as the foundation of the international legal system is seen as novel, exceptional, or illegal. The narrative that the state has become the primary political subject and spatial form of international law masks the persistence of regional orders as a core feature of the contemporary legal system. This article shows that international lawyers have been engaged in justifying, making sense of, narrating, and assembling regional orders for at least the past century. It explores the rival regionalisms promoted during the inter-war period, the struggles over regional orders during the early decades of decolonization, the expansive vision of regional orders consolidated in the early post-Cold War decades by the United States and its allies, and the regional ambitions of China in the twenty-first century. It analyses how regional orders are assembled and resisted through international law, what values are proclaimed to justify different forms of regional ordering, whose interests are represented, and the relation between grand narratives and technical transactions in that legal work. The article concludes that bringing the concept of regional orders to the foreground can open up a new and timely set of questions about politics, representation, and the future of international law.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Destiny of International Law(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2004-01-01)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableBeyond Harmonization: Trade, Human Rights and the Economy of Sacrifice(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2005-01-01)This article engages with the current internationalist debate about the ‘linkage’ or the proper relationship of trade and human rights law. The debate, as played out in activist commentary, scholarly journals and the reports of international institutions, is largely concerned with the substantive obligations or normative commitments involved in the two fields. This article seeks to address instead the forms of law (the patterns of relations and subject positions) that transmit, frame or accompany these obligations and commitments. It suggests that focusing on this question of the forms of law is helpful, perhaps even necessary, in developing an understanding of the political effects of appealing to democratic participation as a counter to the excesses of economic globalization. The particular focus of the article is on WTO agreements that pursue the goal of regulatory harmonization as a means of achieving greater market access and economic integration. It explores the relationship between the form of law mandated by these harmonization agreements (the form of sacrifice), and the form of law envisaged in an appeal to democratic political participation (the form of abandonment).
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ItemNo Preview AvailableFeminism, Imperialism and the Mission of International Law(Brill, 2002)Abstract This special issue of the Nordic Journal of International Law is testimony to the range of international interventions that have been enabled by the energies and insights of feminism. Each of the contributions to this issue is an attempt to think through what it means to read and write feminist legal theory in an age dominated by internationalist narratives, whether of globalization and harmonization, or of high-tech wars on terror and for humanity. This introductory article sketches some of the ethical and political questions that face those of us who attempt to develop a feminist practice of engaging with the projects of international law, whether in the fields of human rights, military intervention, post-conflict reconstruction or economic globalization. In particular, I explore the extent to which feminist internationalism is haunted by the shades of those nineteenth-century European feminists whose role in facilitating empire is undergoing much exploration. In order to think through the ethical issues involved in developing a feminist reading of international law, this article outlines some of the ways in which feminist legal theory is invited to participate in the project of constituting women and the international community. I consider some of the dangers involved in accepting this invitation, and propose alternative methodologies for undertaking the risky project of reading international law.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCommissioning the Truth( 2006)