The Politics of International Law: Approaches and Debates (LAW-DS-POLINT-23)
LAW-DS-POLINT-23
| Department |
LAW |
| Course category |
LAW Seminar - 6 credits |
| Course type |
Seminar |
| Academic year |
2023-2024 |
| Term |
1ST TERM |
| Credits |
6 (EUI Law credits) |
| Professors |
|
| Contact |
Law Department administration,
|
| Course materials |
| Sessions |
03/10/2023 9:00-11:00 @ Sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati
05/10/2023 9:00-11:00 @ Sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati
10/10/2023 9:00-11:00 @ Sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati
12/10/2023 9:00-11:00 @ Sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati
17/10/2023 9:00-11:00 @ Sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati
31/10/2023 9:00-11:00 @ Sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati
02/11/2023 9:00-11:00 @ Sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati
07/11/2023 9:00-11:00 @ Sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati
09/11/2023 9:00-11:00 @ Sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati
14/11/2023 9:00-11:00 @ Sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati
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Description
Traditionally, lawyers have conceived the law as diametrically distinct from politics. If the law is objective, politics is subjective. If in law, lawyers use technical reasoning to arrive at outcomes determined by the legal materials, in politics outcomes are reached in an open contest between competing ideologies and interests. As the law gives institutional shape to political outcomes, legal actors do not redistribute, but rather allocate benefits and burdens according to agreements embedded in preexisting social and economic structures. These and other dichotomies are at the center of liberal legal and political thinking.
This seminar examines the legal traditions that have unpacked these dichotomies. Specifically, we will explore these legal traditions in international legal scholarship.
The seminar is divided in three parts. We will explore first the main insights of the critical legal tradition, including the critiques of formalism and objectivism as well as the indeterminacy of both legal reasoning and the law/society distinction. In the second part, we will examine the critical tradition in international law, that is, how these insights have led to explorations of the field in terms of the political projects of influential lawyers and the structural biases of institutional practices.
Finally, in the third part of the seminar, we will see how the above critiques –of the view that law can be insulated from ideological contestation and from economic, social, cultural, and political power– have been extended, problematized and taken into new directions by new streams of critical legal thought in international law; including feminist legal theory, critical race theory, decolonial critiques, queer legal theory, and third world approaches to international law.
First, Second & Third Term: registration from 25 to 28 September
Register for this course
Page last updated on 05 September 2023