Symposia

International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: A Response to Professors Anderson, Rabkin, and Martinez

Ken Anderson, Jeremy Rabkin, and Jenny Martinez expand in various ways on the concern about constructing a grand narrative introduced on Monday by Harlan Cohen. Anderson discusses a number of questions that might have been used to frame the narrative: legitimacy, the use of international law as a sword or a shield, sovereignty versus internationalism, authority and deference, hegemony, and...

International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Professor Alford on Extraterritoriality

The joy of this project was making the kind of discovery Roger Alford recounts in his post. Alford’s chapter on international law as interpretive tool from 1901 to 1945 discusses, among other things, the Supreme Court’s various approaches to the extraterritorial reach of statutes during that period. Among these approaches was the government purpose test of Unites States v. Bowman...

International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: A Partial Defense of “Insider Doctrinal History”

One of the most intriguing and admirable aspects of this book is that the editors have included within it a scathing critique of the project as a whole. In Chapter 5, “A Social History of International Law: A Historical Commentary, 1861-1900,” John Fabian Witt comments on three preceding chapters on the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence during that period. ...

International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: A Handful of Grand Narrative Questions

Harlan Cohen raises an important caution against being swept up in the attraction, indeed intellectual comfort, of an intellectual grand narrative that can give apparent coherence to a topic as broad-ranging and heterogeneous as international law in the Supreme Court.  The point is very well taken, particularly as it runs to the framing of historical periods; the device of historical periods is useful - essential even - to a point, but only if it is taken as the starting point for sorting things out and not the final arbiter of interpretation, especially on any particular matter. That said, there is more than simply an organizational imperative in asking some framing questions.  I'd like to raise a couple of them here, as a preface for the kinds of issues that most intrigue me in looking at this marvelous study.  They are not in any logical order, and one might easily argue that I've followed a kind of narrative imperative in the ones I've chosen, but they still seem to me important in practically any kind of historical study of this area.