The Law of Strangers: Critical Perspectives on Jewish Lawyering and International Legal Thought is a forthcoming collection of essays edited by James Loeffler and Moria Paz that will be published by Cambridge University Press. The book’s overview:
We think of international lawyers as “a society of Brahmins,” Justice Robert Jackson declared in 1945, “but it would be nearer the truth to say that it is a collection of pariahs.” Do the rarified precincts of international law hold a special attraction for political outsiders in modern society? From the turn of the twentieth century through to the aftermath of World War II, Jewish lawyers such as Rene Cassin, Raphael Lemkin, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Hans Kelsen made outsized contributions to international human rights and humanitarian law, genocide and atrocity law, and legal philosophy. Given these shared origins, commentators have speculated about the imprint of Jewish historical experience on international legal thought. Yet the specific links between modern Jewish identity and international law have never been subjected to systematic, critical analysis. In this book, we address that lacuna with an innovative approach that pairs leading international legal scholars with historians to explore the individual biographies and legal legacies of some of the most famous twentieth-century Jewish lawyers. The result is a book that creatively reframes the past and provocatively challenges the present of international law.
I had to laugh at this line: “Yet the specific links between modern Jewish identity and international law have never been subjected to systematic, critical analysis”.
Nope, no one has ever considered that linkage systematically.
