International Law and the Politics of History

Anne Orford is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Michael D. Kirby Chair of International Law at the University of Melbourne. She has held visiting professorships at Harvard, Lund, Gothenburg and Paris 1, and lectured at the Hague Academy of International Law. Her publications include Reading Humanitarian Intervention (2003), International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (2011), Pensée Critique et Pratique du Droit International (2020), and the co-edited collections The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (2016) and Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917 (2021).

• 1. Neoformalism and the Turn to History in International Law; 2. Situating the Turn to History in International Law; 3. History and the Turn to the International; 4. History's Lawyers; 5. The Past in the Practice of International Law; 6. The History of What?; 7. Why Study the Past of International Law? History as Politics; References; Index.

'In this extensive study, Anne Orford brilliantly traces international law's engagements with history across a century and more, weaving abstruse methodological disputes into an arresting narrative of political possibility foregone. What is history for? And how should it be practiced by those who manage the world's legal affairs? Anne Orford makes the case for doing things with history, for history as a political practice which can as well be apologetic as transformative. For Orford, international legal history is contested ground, an open field of political possibility and struggle. Everyone is here - the footnotes alone are worth the price! Her plea for an engaged and politically responsible history attuned to the ambiguities of the historical record is an invigorating challenge to everyone who dabbles - or dives deep - into the history of international law.' David W. Kennedy, Manley O Hudson Professor of Law and Director, Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School