SSRN: Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law Series

 

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The Origins of the Calvo Clause: Why Carlos Calvo Supported Napoleon III's Vision for Latin America (Edward Jones Corredera)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5092143
Abstract:

This chapter sheds light on the imperial origins of the Calvo Clause. It shows how and why Carlos Calvo, traditionally known as a stalwart supporter of the Monroe Doctrine, initially supported Napoleon III’s imperial vision for the advancement of the interests of the “Latin race” in Latin America. It emphasises how Calvo’s legal thought had a dual role as a critique and an instrument of imperial ambitions. It studies how Carlos Calvo’s diplomatic role as the representative of Paraguay tasked with the resolution of the Canstatt affair in Europe informed his views on international law, intervention, and the role of race in relations between the anglosphere, Latin America, and France. Drawing on his understudied Una página del derecho internacional (1862), this article shows how Calvo marshalled the comments on the affair of leading contemporary statesmen and jurists, such as Édouard Drouyn de Lhuys and Robert Phillimore, his querelle with Juan Bautista Alberdi, the father of Argentinian constitutionalism, and the support of his course of journalists writing in the leading European periodicals of his age, in order to encourage British officials to respect Paraguay’s sovereignty, and to bolster the principle that foreign claims had to be settled according to local laws. Above all, this chapter considers the continuities between Calvo’s defence of Napoleon III’s imperial gaze and his defence of the Monroe Doctrine, encouraging a more contextualised reading of the role of empire, intervention, and diplomacy in the emergence and popularisation of Calvo’s clause and doctrine.

A Histoire Juridique Commune? Historiographical Frames in European and Inter-American Human Rights Narratives (Daniel R. Quiroga Villamarín)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5098631 
Abstract:

In every human rights court procedure, arguments related to history —tacitly or explicitly, willingly or unwittingly— are rehearsed by legal professionals, especially in difficult cases that attempt to bring closure to ‘historical wrongs.’ With this in mind, in this article, I interrogate the ways in which historiographical frames underpin human rights narratives, focusing on cases concerning authoritarianism and state violence in the European and Inter-American systems. With this notion, I refer to how courts use existing public materials —as if they were historians encountering a body of scholarly work— and make ‘historiographical’ decisions about the way these documents shed light on the facts or the applicable law in the dispute at hand. In particular, I focus on how the Strasbourg and San José tribunals engage with arguments related to factual context, legal change, and (dis)continuity in relation to their understanding of the history of the respective regions in which they operate —with important consequences for legal reasoning and judicial interpretation. By bringing these two regional systems in conversation, I highlight how a sense of a shared temporal experience is central to their claims to speak on behalf of Europe or the Americas.