Book Launch: The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas Empire and Legal Networks,?

JUAN PABLO SCARFI

London

Jornada; Book Launch: The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas Empire and Legal Networks,?; 2017

University College London (UCL), Institute of the Americas

The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas offers a history of the deployment of international law for the legitimization of US hemispheric ascendancy in the context of its emergence as an informal empire in the Americas and the origins of the so-called Inter-American System. It also explores the important encounter, mutual understanding, and eventual separation between two prominent international lawyers of the Americas, James Brown Scott (United States) and Alejandro Alvarez (Chile), who epitomized US and Latin American visions of international law and created a continental legal organization for the advancement of a common and unitary hemispheric approach to what they termed American international law. The book concentrates on the golden years of Pan-Americanism and more specifically on the trajectory of the American Institute of International Law, a Pan-American legal organization founded by the US and Chilean international lawyers James Brown Scott and Alejandro Alvarez and devoted to the construction, development and codification of American international law. The AIIL was financially supported by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP). (Drago, Alvarez, Maurtua, Brum, Bustamante, Saavedra Lamas) were part of the AIIL. It also examines the debates generated by the AIIL over the nature and scope of the Monroe Doctrine, American international law, intervention and non-intervention, and the codification of public and private international law, as well as the international legal thought of Scott, Alvarez, and some other jurists, diplomats, and politicians from the Americas, such as Luis María Drago (Argentina), Antonio Sánchez de Bustamante y Sirvén (Cuba), Elihu Root (United States), Víctor Maúrtua (Peru) and Carlos Saavedra Lamas (Argentina). This attempt to provincialize international law succeeded to a certain extent (inter-American multilateralism, non-intervention, sovereign equality, Montevideo Conference, rights and duties of states, statehood), but the scope of its success was partial and limited (construction and consolidation of US hegemony, extend or Pan-Americanize conceptions of US exceptionalism to the Americas) as we shall see. In fact, the main argument of the book is that American international law, as advanced primarily by the AIIL, was driven by a U.S.-led imperial aspiration of civilizing Latin America through the promotion of the international rule of law.