Tag Archive for: history and theory

Book review: H. Muir Watt’s The Law’s Ultimate Frontier: Towards an Ecological Jurisprudence – A Global Horizon in Private International Law (Hart)

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(Written by E. Farnoux and S. Fulli-Lemaire, Professors at the University of Strasbourg)

Horatia Muir Watt (Sciences Po) hardly needs an introduction to the readers of this blog. The book published last year and reviewed here constitutes the latest installment in her critical epistemological exploration of the field of private international law. More specifically, the book builds upon previously published fundamental reflections on the methods of private international law already initiated (or developed) in her previous general course (in French) at the Hague Academy of International Law (Discours sur les méthodes du droit international privé (des formes juridiques de l’inter-altérité)), as well as on the contemporary relevance of private international law (“Private International Law Beyond the Schism”). Numerous other works, naturally, also come to mind when reading this book (see among many others, ed. with L. Bíziková, A. Brandão de Oliveira, D. Fernandez Arroyo, Global Private International Law : adjudication without frontiers; Private International Law and Public law).

The publication of a book on the field that this blog deals with would be enough to justify it being flagged for the readers’ attention. We feel, however, that its relevance to our academic pursuits warrants more than a mere heads-up and, while it would be unreasonable (and risky) to try to summarize the content of this engrossing and complex book in a blog friendly format, we would like to make a few remarks intended to encourage the readers of this blog to engage with this innovative and surprising work.

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New Book: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on Private International Law

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Roxana Banu of Western University has published Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on Private International Law, a new book in the Oxford University Press series on the history and theory of international law.  Information from the publisher can be found here.  From the website:

Private International Law is often criticized for failing to curb private power in the transnational realm. The field appears disinterested or powerless in addressing global economic and social inequality. Scholars have frequently blamed this failure on the separation between private and public international law at the end of the nineteenth century and on private international law’s increasing alignment with private law.

Through a contextual historical analysis, Roxana Banu questions these premises. By reviewing a broad range of scholarship from six jurisdictions (the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the Netherlands) she shows that far from injecting an impetus for social justice, the alignment between private and public international law introduced much of private international law’s formalism and neutrality. She also uncovers various nineteenth century private law theories that portrayed a social, relationally constituted image of the transnational agent, thus contesting both individualistic and state-centric premises for regulating cross-border inter-personal relations.

Overall, this study argues that the inherited shortcomings of contemporary private international law stem more from the incorporation of nineteenth century theories of sovereignty and state rights than from theoretical premises of private law. In turn, by reconsidering the relational premises of the nineteenth century private law perspectives discussed in this book, Banu contends that private international law could take centre stage in efforts to increase social and economic equality by fostering individual agency and social responsibility in the transnational realm.