Professor Martti Koskenniemi, a scholar of international law from the University of Helsinki, will deliver a guest lecture on the law of nations at Kent on 11 February.
Professor Koskenniemi is Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights in Finland, Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, and a former Finnish diplomat. He has been invited to Kent by the Centre for Critical Thought and Kent Law School.
His talk, ‘Sovereignty and Property: some thoughts about the history of the law of nations’, will examine the transformations of the notion of the “law of nations” from early modern legal thought to the end of the natural law tradition in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The abstract for the lecture says: ‘With early modern thinkers such as Vitoria or Grotius, the concept of “jus gentium” covered universal relations of property and sovereignty. Both were understood as techniques of government under the science of natural law. In due course, the law of nations was restricted to deal only with public law relations between sovereigns, while property was conceptualized as a matter of domestic private law. As a result, the sense of the connection between the two forms of dominion was lost, with loss of a full grasp of the role of law in Europe’s imperial control over the world.’
The talk (supported by Clio, a law and history research group at Kent Law School), will be held at 5pm in Grimond Lecture Theatre 3 on the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus.
Prof. Koskenniemi’s special fields of interests lie in international law, and international legal history, state succession and human rights. His current research interests include the fragmentation of international law. He has published widely in these fields with main publications including From Apology to Utopia; The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989/2005), The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2001) and The Politics of International Law (2011).