Law, Empire, and International Order

This seminar surveys dynamic new research on the role of law in imperial and international orders. If recent scholarship has recast empires as forms of international ordering, and, conversely, international orders as adaptions of imperial governance, law has figured prominently in these interpretive departures. Ranging across the modern period, the seminar's themes include sovereignty and quasi-sovereignty; legal pluralism and extraterritoriality; citizenship and colonial subjecthood; imperial constitutions and international organizations; human rights and "juridical humanity"; self-determination, decolonization, post-imperial worldmaking.