12 October 2017- The Internationalists
Channel: LSE Law School
Date: 2017-11-16

Speaker(s): Professor Scott J. Shapiro (Yale Law School); Professor Gerry Simpson (LSE) 
Chair: Dr Devika Hovell (LSE) 
Recorded on 12 October 2017 at Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building.

On a hot summer afternoon in 1928, the leaders of the world assembled in Paris to outlaw war. But the promise of that summer day was fleeting. Within a decade of its signing, every signatory state that had gathered in Paris to renounce war was at war.

The Internationalists, published recently by Professor Oona Hathaway and Professor Scott Shapiro and which will be discussed in this talk, tells the story of the Peace Pact by placing it in the long history of international law from the seventeenth century through the present, tracing this rich history through a fascinating and diverse array of lawyers, politicians and intellectuals—Hugo Grotius, Nishi Amane, Salmon Levinson, James Shotwell, Sumner Welles, Carl Schmitt, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Sayyid Qutb. In their book, Hathaway and Shapiro examine with renewed appreciation an international system that has outlawed wars of aggression and brought unprecedented stability to the world map, making the central claim that the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact was the pivotal factor in catalyzing this complex change in international relations. The book's co-author Scott Shapiro will be joined on the panel by experts in the crime of aggression and the use of force to debate the central claims in the book.