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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ItemA Global Rule of Law(Cambridge University Press, 2021-08-03)The view of international law as a profession committed to the spread of liberal ideas emerged in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century.1 One of those ideas was the rule of law. Attempts to realize a global rule of law and attempts to constitute an international community have long been linked. For many international lawyers, this gave international law a sense of forward movement and a clear telos, with the caveat that the reality of unequal power relations meant that international law could never be measured directly against a model borrowed from domestic law and politics.
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ItemInternational Law and the Social Question(Asser Press, 2020)While international law has played a central role in creating the conditions for market liberalization on a global scale, many international lawyers have paid less attention to the social question - that is, the question of who is able to participate in political decision-making about economic relations and property rights. The current moment of perceived backlash to international law and institutions offers an opportunity to think again about the ways of relating politics, economics, and the social that have been consolidated through international law and to do so by posing the issue as a question of representation. How might international economic law-making and adjudication be re-embedded within political processes? And how can foundational political questions about property, security, survival, and freedom be returned to democratic control?
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ItemA Jurisprudence of the Limit(Cambridge University Press, 2006)
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ItemReading humanitarian intervention: Human rights and the use of force in international law(Cambridge University Press, 2003-01-01)During the 1990s, humanitarian intervention seemed to promise a world in which democracy, self-determination and human rights would be privileged over national interests or imperial ambitions. Orford provides critical readings of the narratives that accompanied such interventions and shaped legal justifications for the use of force by the international community. Through a close reading of legal texts and institutional practice, she argues that a far more circumscribed, exploitative and conservative interpretation of the ends of intervention was adopted during this period. The book draws on a wide range of sources, including critical legal theory, feminist and postcolonial theory, psychoanalytic theory and critical geography, to develop ways of reading directed at thinking through the cultural and economic effects of militarized humanitarianism. The book concludes by asking what, if anything, has been lost in the move from the era of humanitarian intervention to an international relations dominated by wars on terror.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Destiny of International Law(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2004-01-01)