This paper is a brief review essay of Anne Orford's book 'International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect' which, along with three others and a response by the author published in the inaugural issue of the 'London Review of International Law', was first given at an author-meets-reader session at the University of Sydney. This review addresses the Foucaultian dimensions of Orford's book.

I INTRODUCTION In recent years, the legal academy has begun to tell itself the story of how and why legal theory was marginalized in the wake of critical legal studies and the theory debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the volume of work written on the subject and the many anxieties expressed about the (im)possibility of critical legal theory's revival, the narratives of what led to this juncture are deeply conflicted. There is even debate about what precisely has been lost. Some argue that it is just the very visible, radical critical legal studies movement that has passed from the legal theory scene. (1) Others contend the leftist project more generally has run out of steam. (2) And still others assert that theory has been marginalized within the humanities and social sciences as well, making the disappearance of legal theory just one instance of this larger trend. (3) What seems beyond dispute is that "legal theory is out." (4) Comparing the current intellectual...

Since 1976, the VSBO disciplinary board has been only a body oF unauthorized individuals with no judicial authority created by fiat by the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Current research and evidence supports that Supreme Court of Virginia and the Virginia State Bar Organization routinely commit violations of the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The interests of justice demand an impartial tribunal , but the Court refused to request that the Virginia General Assembly to preside over the appeal of the Appellant’s matters and the appeals of all other misconduct and impairment matters involving attorneys practicing law in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

On June 25, 2019, the Supreme Court of Virginia refused to ask the Virginia General Assembly appoint an impartial tribunal and dismissed all related Motions for the same.

This chapter attempts to analyse the way in which insights from the Marxist tradition can illuminate international human rights law. It begins by outlining the key elements of historical materialism. It then selects three key analytics – class, ideology and the structure of capitalism – and shows how they can illuminate the general phenomenon of human rights. In particular, it argues that human rights law is a social relation that mediates the struggles between classes. However, the particular form that this takes is one which tends to recast social conflict as a matter of individual rights violations and to draw attention away the root causes of social problems.

The chapter then goes on to apply these insights to the RMT v United Kingdom case, concerning the issue of secondary strikes in industrial disputes. It argues that aside from directly advantaging the capitalist class in its judgement, the European Court of Human Rights also reproduced the ideological effects of human rights law. In particular, it recast the political-economic logic of class conflict as a technocratic clash of individual rights. The chapter closes with an attempt to think through whether it would be possible to articulate a vision of human rights which takes on board the political-economic issues flagged up by Marxist analysis.

Full book available here - https://www.crcpress.com/Research-Methods-for-International-Human-Rights-Law-Beyond-the-traditional/Gonzalez-Salzberg-Hodson/p/book/9781138603554

There are many histories of the police as a law-enforcement institution, but no genealogy of the police as a form of power. This book provides a genealogy of the modern police by tracing the evolution of ‘police science’ and of police institutions in Europe, from the ancien régime to the early 19th century. Drawing on the theoretical path outlined by Michel Foucault at the crossroads between historical sociology, critical legal theory and critical criminology, it shows how the development of police power was an integral part of the birth of the modern state’s governmental rationalities and how police institutions were conceived as political technologies for the government and social disciplining of populations. Understanding modern police not as an institution at the service of the judiciary and the law, but as a complex political technology for governing the economic and social processes typical of modern capitalist societies, this book shows how the police have played an active role in actually shaping order, rather than merely preserving it.

Law here, law there, law everywhere. The first nine months of the Trump administration have thrust questions about the force of law, legal strategy and tactics, and the role of judges in the United States' much-vaunted system of constitutional checks and balances to the fore of public attention. Debates about legal statutes, precedents, and institutions have raged intensely and with near-

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

Randall Trapp, et al. v. Commissioner DuBois, et al. was filed in 1995 on behalf of a group of inmates who were part of a Native American Spiritual Awareness Council in a Massachusetts prison. The Council maintained a weekly Circle and other practices associated with American Indian spirituality. At the time of filing, the Circle had already been in existence at the prison for more than five years.

The case proceeded to trial in 1999. In 2002, the Massachusetts Appeals Court ordered the Defendants to settle the controversy by negotiations with the Plaintiffs. In 2003, the first Purification Lodges were held inside three Massachusetts prisons, where named Plaintiffs were incarcerated (several having been transferred from the original prison). By 2003, Native Circles were meeting regularly in many prisons in the state.

http://people.umass.edu/derrico/trapp/

This contribution (in Dutch) reflects upon the contribution of critical legal studies to legal debate in the Netherlands. It places the Dutch journal 'Recht en Kritiek' (1975-1997) in a broader comparative context by comparing it to similar movements abroad. It also makes an attempt to better define what the critical approach to law actually is and asks what its future may be.

1 Jindal Law Review 18 (2015)        The  impact  of  Duncan Kennedy  on  legal  scholarship  has  been  undeniable.  In  this  paper  the  author pays tribute to Duncan  Kennedy and the impact that his work has had on the study of law, most  specifically,  the  globalization  of  law. This  article analyzes  the  institutional  history  of international trade law  and demonstrates how Kennedy’s work on the globalization of law is relevant to this project.

This two-day symposium explores the relationship between the material, cultural, psychic and symbolic dimensions and effects of dispossession. Building on a range of critical feminisms, the papers, collective discussions and keynote addresses will take forward and build on the rich and dynamic traditions of black, indigenous and post-colonial feminisms, queer theory and materialist feminisms.

This article addresses the implications of a new resistance to hate crime legislation that has yet to be addressed in the mainstream legal debate in Canada or the United States. It comes mainly from groups in the US that represent lgbtq communities who are poor and/or of color. These communities are particularly vulnerable to victimization by hate crime yet the groups have repeatedly opposed the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression in hate crime legislation. This article addresses the underlying rationale of the new resistance and its implications for the mainstream debate. It begins by undertaking a comparative analysis of hate crime legislation in Canada and the US. It then considers the mainstream legal debate in both countries as well as some statistical data on hate crime. The third section turns to the new resistance as well as emerging data on the connection between victimization and the criminal legal system itself. It then draws on the legal theory of Walter Benjamin to reveal limits in the way that the mainstream legal debate conceptualizes criminalization. The final section of the article considers the implications of Benjamin’s concept of law for both the mainstream debate and the new resistance.

In this short article I argue that the UK government’s decision not to update the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) is more than a missed opportunity. It weaponises the GRA, now an effective instrument of assimilation and containment. The failure to reform the GRA seems like a maintenance of the status quo, but given that the circumstances have significantly changed since 2004, the GRA now explicitly fails trans people, including nonbinary people – and in fact this is the intention. Rather than being a flawed attempt to improve trans lives, the GRA is a well-designed apparatus of biopolitical control that reinforces binary gender and cisnormativity, demanding assimilation in return for recognition.

This paper focuses on a particular exposition of one of Critical Legal Studies’s claims, more commonly associated with Mark Kelman  and less so associated to Kevät Nousiainen.  Kelman, setting his sights on criminal law, highlights the arational choices  in factual construction in which  judges can either use narrow or broad time frames in which to locate a defendant’s act -- thus subsequently  affecting the normative ascription of responsibility. Nousiainen similarly deploys the use of broad or narrow time frames in formulating her triad of ‘text, time and reality construction’  pushing further still by attempting to articulate the theory of time that informs the process of ‘time framing’ in adjudication. Incredibly however, time frames, a tool what  Kelman says is part of the interpretive construction step in criminal law adjudication, ‘goes virtually unexamined’. 

Time frames, I will argue, actually bring together many of the underlying themes of both the American Legal Realism (ALR) and Critical Legal Studies (CLS) attacks on legal formalism. My position will be that time frames necessarily inform both the indeterminacy posited by Karl Llewellyn’s Janus-faced doctrine of precedent  and the central claims of the CLS movement, particularly the contradictions between rules-standards and free-will-determinism that plague  law and adjudication. I will argue therefore, that time frame indeterminacy has chronological priority, in that it makes possible the claims of indeterminacy central to ALR and CLS attacks on formalism. In other words, a judge’s determination of the scope of the period of time of legal relevance has chronological priority over different types of indeterminacy that problematize a legal decision.

We often think about justice and social change in terms of refinement and better implementation of legal or economic theories and categories. Justice and change are often understood as more accountability and participation, as resistance to free movement/ autonomy considerations and an emphasis on social ones, as resistance to the ‘the market’, as a general protection of the weaker party, or a better theory or alignment of the entire legal system with general constitutional values and principles. Change is expected to follow from an overtly political discourse that should free us from the shackles of legal language and enable the concerns of the people to be voiced.
However, "Justice" cannot be understood in terms of any theory or concept. The word justice only makes sense because of the current unjust reality. Justice should be understood dynamically, as constant social transformation. Legal thinking misses the hierarchical structure of society and when considering justice too often assumes an abstract category or theory that can bring about “justice”.
For example, it is generally assumed in legal consciousness that the identity of the weaker party can be generalised and predetermined. Beside its reliance on constitutionalism and on conceptual understanding of the legal structure, the conceptualism of contemporary legal thought, this was one of the main weaknesses of the European Social Justice Manifestos. A legal system favoring an abstract “weaker party” is bound to struggle with concerns of justice. 
We cannot rely on any theory or worldview when thinking about justice. Such thinking about "justice" often contributes to the reproduction of existing hierarchies - to the reproduction of the status quo, particularly when (hierarchical) reality is interpreted according to existing ideology. Justice means a dynamic change of the currently unjust hierarchical reality that needs to be constantly constructed and reconstructed. The aim of social transformation cannot be a final solution, a perfect social order, or ubiquitous affirmations of ‘social’ considerations, nor a stable state of justice, but rather a constant pursuit of “justice”.

In the Brazilian First Republic (1889-1930), regarding the question of the tactics of constructing and defining Brazilian law, jurists searched for countries that would be civilizational ideals, with citation of authors, legislations and institutions of a given language or country. In this article it was pointed out that the selection of legal doctrines, legislations and institutions originating from certain legal cultures and the motivation to choose them also indicated the preference for certain civilizational ideals. In the republican period analyzed in this article, there was a predominance of jurists who had a predilection for the Anglo-American tradition, as imagined, not without resistance from those who had a predilection for the Franco-Portuguese and, in a smaller dimension, from those who had a predilection for the Germanic tradition. The preference for these traditions, as it is shown, also found a connection with reality, with the solution of concrete problems, and it was not only the fruit of legal idealism, of a mere abstract discussion.

jurisprudence, the focus on custodial deaths has let the larger problem of torture (as well as cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment) fade into the background. Thus, like its U.S. counterpart, the Indian Supreme Court has consistently evaded the problem of torture, in part through a somewhat erratic jurisprudence and in part by focusing on the problem of custodial deaths rather than addressing torture comprehensively. A second chapter on torture and interrogation in India revolves around emergency legislation against terrorism from the mid-1980s through the present.

Considering the law as a social phenomenon intrinsic to political economy is key to engaging the work in this new volume of scholarly articles edited by Professor Poul Kjaer – The Law of Political Economy: Transformation in the Function of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020).  The book is relevant on many levels to the events unfolding around us including unresolved issues between the private and the public realms (e.g., think banking and government in relation to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008).  Current manifestations (post-book publication) include the ruling of the German Constitutional Court in May, which at core, appears to challenge the legitimacy of EU law for German financial interests.  However distant such regulatory and legal matters may, at first appear, the idea that theories ‘are reflected in our social relationships’ anchors a more general observation made in this book’s introductory chapter concerning theoretical architectures as differentiating ‘between a holistic or a differentiation-based worldview, that is, between an understanding of society as a whole, which is larger than the sum of its parts, or an understanding of society as a mere collection of differentiated parts.’
In this NBn episode, Professor Poul Kjaer distinguishes such concepts among others, and sets the context for those with an interest in learning about ‘the law and political economy’ as a field of study including an explanation of the differences between the European and American approaches to this field.  Some other points of elaboration include more detailed thoughts on his introductory chapter, his previous books dealing with governance and governing, corporatism’s many guises, intermediary institutions as key locations for social integration and dis-integration, the concept of crisis and how law regulates the economy and politics, with Georg Simmel, in a sense, underlying it all with the question: ‘how is society possible?’
Professor Kjaer explains key concepts and thinkers in this field as he provides a lay of the land as surveyed from the ‘Copenhagen School’.  He also shares his impressions with the book editing process, and some of the more foundational concepts and sources. The book brings ‘together an exceptional group of scholars’ providing a ‘novel conceptual framework for studying the role of law and legal instruments in political economy contexts, with a focus on historical transformations and central challenges in both European and global contexts’.  This volume’s many contributions cover legal subfields ‘ranging from competition and consumer protection law to labour and environmental law, giving a comprehensive overview of the central challenges of the law of political economy.’ It should be added that the 15 chapters are compellingly written, and the book is available in hardcover and Kindle.

Poul F. Kjaer is a professor at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in Denmark with a research focus on European and global governance, the law and political economy.

Ez a tanulmány Takács Péter tiszteletére íródott, és egy olyan államelméleti megközelítést mutat be, amely párhuzamosan Takács Péter törekvéseivel:  nem kapcsolódik közvetlenül a joggyakorlatok dogmatikai vitáihoz, annál általánosabb konceptuális keretben fejti ki állításait. Az írás az ünnepelt 65. születésnapjára készült kötetben fog megjelenni. A kötet elkészítésért Cserne Pétert, Jakab Andrást, Könczöl Miklóst és Paksy Mátét illeti köszönet.

From Kosovo and Iraq to Syria and Crimea, the specter of military intervention is a core theme within international law and policy literature. Rather than address 'warfare' and 'humanitarian intervention' as something actually occurring 'out there in the real world', this essay focuses on their functions within the text as a rhetorical device that helps constitute the structural conditions of disciplinary argument. In the face of what feels like escalating threats requiring immediate reaction, this essay seeks to demonstrate that it is instead exactly the right moment for reflection on the analytical toolkits that we take with us as partisans of a legal persuasion into given conflicts.

This chapter analyses constitutional amendments in the Russian Federation (1993–2014). We show that in the phase of constitution-making a problematic path was adopted when the El'cin administration promoted a basic law advantaging the executive. The praxis of constitutional amendment in the Russian Federation is discussed in three dimensions: First, concerning amendments to Art. 65, which regulates the structure of the federal republic; second, concerning changes to the structure or principles of the constitutional system; third, concerning de facto constitutional amendments through ordinary laws. In particular, a combination of amendments of the second and third dimensions substantially centralized the constitutional regime over the past 20 years, moving it toward an authoritarian state order. The Russian praxis of constitutional amendment is here classified as authoritarian constitutionalism.

Ponencia ofrecida en ocasión de la conmemoración del 30 aniversario de la publicación del "Esquema para el análisis de problemas de Derecho Civil Patrimonial" del profesor Michel J. Godreau Robles. La publicación oficial se encuentra en 86 Rev. Jur. UPR 424 (2017).

Focusing on the moment when social unrest takes hold of a populace, Law and Disorder offers a new account of sovereignty with an affective theory of public order and protest.

In a state of unrest, the affective architecture of the sovereign order begins to crumble. The everyday peace and calm of public space is shattered as sovereign peace is challenged. In response, the state unleashes the full force of its exceptionality, and the violence of public order policing is deployed to restore the affects and atmospheres of habitual social relations. This book is a work of contemporary critical legal theory. It develops an affective theory of sovereign orders by focusing on the government of affective life and popular encounters with sovereignty. The chapters explore public order as a key articulation between sovereignty and government. In particular, policing of public order is exposed as a contemporary mode of exceptionality cast in the fires of colonial subjection. The state of unrest helps us see the ordinary affects of the sovereign order, but it also points to crowds as the essential component in the production of unrest. The atmospheres produced by crowds seep out from the squares and parks of occupation, settling on cities and states. In these new atmospheres, new possibilities of political and social organisation begin to appear. In short, crowds create the affective condition in which the settlement at the heart of the sovereign order can be revisited. This text thus develops a theory of sovereignty which places protest at its heart, and a theory of protest which starts from the affective valence of crowds.

This book’s examination of the relationship between sovereignty and protest is of considerable interest to readers in law, politics and cultural studies, as well as to more general readers interested in contemporary forms of political resistance.

For the last three years I have taught a course called “Sovereignty in Law, Theory and Culture” for final year undergraduate students, cross listed for both law and arts students. The course takes a transdisciplinary approach and has drawn on a variety of literary and theoretical materials in an effort to unpack sovereignty. I have experimented with different “primer” texts for the first session of the semester – including essays by Wendy Brown, Dieter Grimm and Martin Loughlin – but have generally found that they enter into a discussion about sovereignty at a level of detail that students tend to find off-putting; especially those with no prior experience of law or political theory. Moreover, I couldn’t find any accessible text that introduces the concept by reference to its legal, political and aesthetic aspects; the latter, in particular, being something that the course examines. Instead of using a stand-alone academic article or book chapter, this year I decided to write an extended introduction to the course. This is it.

… pour ma part, je ne crois pas qu'il soit possible de faire comme si nos formes de représentation pouvaient avoir été bouleversées de fond en comble dans le domaine de l'art, de la philosophie ou de la morale sans qu'il soit nécessaire, ou même simplement utile, d'en tirer la moindre conséquence dans le domaine du droit. » (1) NORD COMPO -Editions du Juris-Classeur 149880RQU -LA DOCTRINE EN DROIT ADMINISTRATIF -COLLOQUE Rappel p. 176 -Z49880$$$1 -31-12-09 12:20:10

Al volume "Il diritto al viaggio. Abbecedario delle migrazioni", curato da Luca Barbari e Francesco De Vanna, hanno partecipato con un contributo: Tindara Addabbo, Stefania Ascari, Luca Baccelli, Luca Barbari, Gualtiero Bassetti, Fabrizio Battistelli, Leonardo Becchetti, Barbara Giovanna Bello, Roberta Biagiarelli, Andrea Bosi, Alberto Caldana, Daniele Cantini, Thomas Casadei, Erio Castellucci, Andrea Cavallini, Bruno Ciancio, Luigi Ciotti, Gabriella Covri, Ignazio de Francesco, Francesco De Vanna, Carla Faralli, Giovanni Antonio Forte, Vera Gheno, Orsetta Giolo, Raffaele Iaria, Kashetu "Cécile" Kyenge, Marina Lalatta Costerbosa, Francesco Lauria, Delfina Licata, Donatella Loprieno, Fabio Macioce, Teresa Marzocchi, Bruno Mastroianni, Germain Nzinga Makitu, Giuseppe Moscati, Vincenzo Pacillo, Baldassare Pastore, Edoardo Patriarca, Gian Carlo Perego, Maria Rita Pozzi, Simone Ramilli, Lucia Re, Enrica Rigo, Vincenzo Russo, Emilio Santoro, Alessandra Sciurba, Paolo Seghedoni, Vincenzo Sorrentino, Maria Elisabetta Vandelli, Serena Vantin, Gianfrancesco Zanetti.



La collana “Diritto e vulnerabilità” è lo strumento del quale il Centro di Ricerca Interdipartimentale su Discriminazione e vulnerabilità (CRID) dell’Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, con sede presso il Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza, si è dotato per dare forma strutturata, in veste di pubblicazioni, ad alcuni studi e attività che costituiscono una parte integrante della sua mission – sono le promesse mantenute del Centro. 

In essa trovano posto indagini teoriche e ricerche empiriche, ricostruzioni storiche e analisi istituzionali, nonché riflessioni e testimonianze della ricerca e del dibattito pubblico contemporanei, che hanno affrontato o affrontano vecchie e nuove configurazioni della discriminazione e della vulnerabilità.

È aperta a studiosi e studiose di ogni estrazione e di ogni orientamento dottrinale.



Direzione: Thomas Casadei e Gianfrancesco Zanetti

Serve o pensamento jurídico como meio para recuperar a imaginação de alternativas institucionais, que minguou na cultura e na política contemporâneas? O movimento dos estudos jurídicos críticos foi a mais importante corrente de ideias progressistas no direito dos últimos 70 anos. Seu maior teórico foi o brasileiro Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Este livro foi escrito como manifesto do movimento e acrescido de novo texto que trata de como pensar, a partir de agora, o direito e as instituições. Valerá no Brasil por uma convocação. Tradução de Lucas Fucci Amato

This paper aims to prove that, due to a series of systematic, political and legal reasons, the structure of the grand jury has been transformed in ways that have altered its function, the result of which gives rise to a decrease in the screening function of grand juries and their protection of the accuse vis a vis the investigatory function of this institution, further empowering the prosecution to instrumentalize the grand jury in ways unintended by its incorporation into the 5th amendment. It concludes by arguing that these transformations have not only stripped the institution of its purpose, but also allow the prosecution to abuse its power and disregard its duty.

The informal economy is typically understood as being outside the law. However, this article develops the concept 'social uses of the law' to interrogate how informal workers understand, engage and deploy the law, facilitating the development of more nuanced theorizations of both the informal economy and the law. The article explores how a legal victory over the Johannesburg Council by reclaimers of reusable and recyclable materials at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa shaped their subjectivities and became bound up in struggles between reclaimers at the dump. Engaging with critical legal theory, the author argues that in a social world where most people do not read, understand, or cite court rulings, the 'social uses of the law' can be of greater import than the actual judgement. This does not, however, render the state absent, as the assertion that the court sanctioned particular claims and rights is central to the reclaimers' social uses of the law. Through the social uses of the law, these reclaimers force us to consider how and why the law, one of the cornerstones of state formation, cannot be separated from the informal ways it is understood and deployed. The article concludes by sketching a research agenda that can assist in developing a more relational understanding of the law and the informal economy.

This paper will be presented at a forthcoming conference in Madrid at the CEU University San Pablo. It is an attempt to survey the broad field of critical international human rights approaches, suggest their explanatory power for some concrete human rights issues and outline a few leads for what a sustained critical/constructive engagement with human rights could be.

The 1648 Peace of Westphalia typifies the “modern” starting point of state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention within conventional historical treatments of International Relations (IR) theory. The treaties ending the Thirty Years’ War signaled the dawn of an international society after medieval Latin Christendom with new diplomatic arrangements that assigned legitimate autonomy to specific European states independent of Roman imperial and papal authorities. The ideological archetypes of Westphalia for IR theory during the twentieth century were contemporaries Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) the realist and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) the rationalist. Each of them powerfully envisioned a modern form of international relations: Hobbes accented sovereign political independence and international anarchy between states whereas Grotius affirmed a worldwide association of states absent a global authority yet still regulated by norms of universal law to justify war and intervention. Hobbesian sovereignty and Grotian international law produce the dynamic tension and terms of modern international relations. Yet the turn to the global history of international law has challenged the conceptual parameters of the IR Westphalian narrative focused on intra-European relations between sovereign states. In particular, attention to the constitutive role of imperial expansion and colonial settlement outside Europe offers a richer scope for analyzing the development of “modern” international relations and its legal-political concepts such as the state of nature, the law of occupation, and the law of nations.