Content

Too often, a false dichotomy is created between the ‘theory’ and the ‘practice’ of law. But the two are intimately inter-related, and each produces the other. The practice of law is its lifeblood: through it, international law is created, reshaped, and renewed in order to adapt to emerging global circumstances. Yet theory helps us to explain and situate these practices, to view them in their historical, social and political contexts, and to challenge the power structures of which international law is a part.

This course is rooted in the idea that theory matters even for legal practice, in that it helps to situate the relationship between law and politics, the role and limits of law in structuring governance, and how law plays a constitutive role in the empowerment of certain groups and the marginalisation of others. The course will also delve into certain inter-disciplinary debates.

Europe’s place as a dominant political and economic actor has given it an outsized role in shaping the contemporary role. As such, this course looks at European legal theory in its global context, seeking to understand how European intellectual traditions have emerged and shaped transnational legal debates. Through European colonisation of most of the non-European world, these ideas have a global reach and have shaped public international law, the law of the EU and many other transnational legal developments. They have also come under sustained challenge. The global reach of European theoretical traditions will also be considered here.

The course will be structured around a selection of academic writings, both classic and contemporary, to introduce the student to historical and contemporary debates in legal scholarship, in Europe and beyond.

An illustrate list of topics follows. Naturally, not all topics will be covered every year:

• The traditional naturalism-positivism debate
• The European ‘Enlightenment’ and the ‘scientific’ approach to law
• First critiques of the Enlightenment and Modernism
• Law, political theory, and the social sciences
• The British/Anglo-American traditions of analytical jurisprudence
• Formalism, positivism, and the ‘pure theory of law’
• Scandinavian legal realism
• Marxism, from the nineteenth century to today, in Europe and beyond
• The emergence of critical theory
• Cosmopolitanism: the globalisation of European legal traditions?
• Post-structuralism and the politics of law
• Feminist approaches to law and politics
• European legal theory and post-colonial critiques

Course material

The (recommended) workshop materials (including questions) and as a list of suggested readings are available on the course's webpage on Toledo.

Format: more information

The course will be taught in two-hour interactive seminars, with a substantive introduction and participatory format. Reading will have to be done in advance. During the participatory section, the theoretical issues will be analysed by discussing practical examples of the issues covered in the lectures.