Evening event: 'Textbooks: markers and makers of international law' - Dr Luíza Leão Soares Pereira, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Time: 5.30 pm - 6.30 pm (followed by a drinks reception in the Old Library)

In-person event only

You never forget your first… international law textbook. Most of us have an emotional, even if not loving, relationship to those tomes that initiated us into the discipline (Koskenniemi M, ‘Book Review Brownlie’s Principles of Public International Law’ (2014) 83 BYIL 137, 137). Yet textbooks receive limited attention as scholarship. Cast as training tools that do not encapsulate original insights by virtue of their genre, we tend to miss how their comprehensiveness paints a broad and nuanced picture of international law and its place in world making. I propose in this lecture that we analyse textbooks as artefacts that help us better understand our discipline and profession. In particular, I will be discussing the insights gained by empirical analysis of the ten main international law textbooks in Brazil undertaken by myself and Fabio Morosini over the last four years (Pereira LLS and Morosini FC, ‘Textbooks as Markers and Makers of International Law: A Brazilian Case Study’ (2024) 35 European Journal of International Law 1). We examined the themes these volumes explore, the materials they cite, and the biographies of their authors. The results we obtained provide not only a unique window into the content of Brazilian textbooks themselves but also a complex, historically and socially situated picture of international law as a field in Brazil. I will then talk about our ongoing project to expand our analysis of textbooks beyond Brazil. In the last year, we have invited others to join our enterprise to study textbooks from other regions (Africa, Asia, the Arab World, and certain specific jurisdictions), and other sub-disciplines of international law (Human Rights, International Economic Law, International Environmental Law, to name a few). We also interviewed textbook authors from diverse nationalities, backgrounds, and methodological persuasions, and invited scholars to bend the academic genre and write short essays engaging with the textbook theme in a creative way. What we hope to achieve in this project is to revisit textbooks and their function beyond training materials, unveiling their analytical, political and social possibilities. This research project is funded by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).
 
Dr Luíza Leão Soares Pereira is a Brazilian international lawyer, trained at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre, Brazil) and the University of Cambridge. She was a Lecturer at the University of Sheffield (2020-2022), and is now a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, funded by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). She is considers herself a generalist, but her work uses varied methodologies (empirical, historical, sociological, feminist, critical) to better understand the international legal discipline and profession, broadly construed. Her work has been published in the European Journal of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, and edited volumes published by Oxford University Press (1, 2) and Manchester University Press.