LCIL Friday Lecture: 'Koskenniemi’s Lauterpacht: A 'Gentle Civilizer'?' - Prof Robert Schütze, University of Durham

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Lecture summary: Hersch Lauterpacht’s normative project has been subject to a number of excellent studies in the past – most notably by Martti Koskenniemi. The central image of the latter’s ‘Lauterpacht’ is, famously, that of a backward-looking thinker: Lauterpacht is portrayed as a ‘natural lawyer’ who nostalgically looks back into the 19th century as the last representative of a ‘Victorian tradition’ in international law. This talk wishes to critique and challenge this influential intellectual portrait. In order to do this, it revisits Lauterpacht’s rich academic oeuvre in three parts. Part 1 begins with a reconstruction of Lauterpacht’s understanding of the judicial function – a function on which much of Koskenniemi’s Lauterpacht hinges. Part 2 explores the legislative function within Lauterpacht’s international legal order, while Part 3 investigates the ‘function’ given to natural law in Lauterpacht’s normative project. Against this reconstructed background, Koskenniemi’s ‘Lauterpacht’ will be re-evaluated; and a conclusion contends that Lauterpacht is best characterized as a utopian international federalist, whose supranational legacy has largely remained unredeemed.

Robert Schütze is Professor of European and Global Law. He is a constitutional scholar with a particular expertise in the law of the European Union and comparative federalism. He co-founded the Durham Global Policy Institute with the political scientist David Held and also teaches at LUISS (Rome) as well as the College of Europe (Bruges). In the past, he has held numerous Visiting Professorships and was, for example, a Fulbright-Schuman Fellow at Harvard University and a Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute. He has published extensively on European Union law and (some) public international law and is best known for his “federal” reading of the European Union. As an editor, he co-founded, the Oxford Comparative Constitutionalism Series and he also co-directs the Oxford European Union Library as well as the Hart Series on Parliamentary Democracy in Europe. He is a joint co-editor of the Yearbook of European Law – OUP’s flagship journal on the law of the European Union.

Chair: Dr John Barker, Centre Fellow

There is a sandwich lunch at 12.30 pm in the Old Library at the Centre. All lecture attendees welcome.

The Friday Lunchtime Lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press & Assessment.