(Source: OUP)
Oxford
University Press has published a new book on James Brown Scott, his works, and
his choice to lay the foundation of modern international law with Francisco de
Vitoria.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In the interwar
years, international lawyer James Brown Scott wrote a series of works on the
history of his discipline. He made the case that the foundation of modern
international law rested not, as most assumed, with the seventeenth-century
Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius, but with sixteenth-century Spanish theologian
Francisco de Vitoria. Far from being an antiquarian assertion, the Spanish
origin narrative placed the inception of international law in the context of
the discovery of America, rather than in the European wars of religion. The
recognition of equal rights to the American natives by Vitoria was the pedigree
on which Scott built a progressive international law, responsive to the rise of
the United States as the leading global power and developments in international
organization such as the creation of the League of Nations.
This book describes the Spanish origin project in context, relying on Scott's biography, changes in the self-understanding of the international legal profession, as well as on larger social and political trends in US and global history. Keeping in mind Vitoria's persisting role as a key figure in the canon of international legal history, the book sheds light on the contingency of shared assumptions about the discipline and their unspoken implications. The legacy of the international law Scott developed for the American century is still with the profession today, in the shape of the normalization and de-politicization of rights language and of key concepts like equality and rule of law.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paolo Amorosa, Post-Doctoral Researcher, Centre of
Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives, University of Helsinki
Paolo Amorosa is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at
the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives at the
University of Helsinki. Between 2012 and 2016 he was a fellow at the Erik
Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, within the Academy of
Finland project 'History of International Law: Religion and Empire'. He
obtained a Doctor of Laws degree from the Law Faculty of the University of
Helsinki in 2018. He co-edited International Law and Religion: Historical and
Contemporary Perspectives (OUP, 2017). His main research interests lie in the
history of international law, human rights, and European integration.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Introduction
Prologue: The
Education of James Brown Scott, 1866-1896
Part I: The Rise
and Fall of James Brown Scott and the Turn to United States history, 1898-1921
1: Explaining
Scott's Turn to American History
2: International
Law as Faith. The Cuban Intervention and the Narrative of 1898
3: International
Law as Science. Scott's Historical Case for Adjudication and the Fight against
Collective Security
Part II:
Rewriting International Legal History: Vitoria and the New World, 1925-1939
4: The Spanish
Origin of International Law
5: The Catholic
Conception of International Law
6: Apostles of
Equality: James Brown Scott and the Feminist Cause
Concluding
Remarks: The Legacy of James Brown Scott and the Responsibilities of
International Legal History
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