Leao Soares Pereira, L. and Ridi, N. (2021) Mapping the “invisible college of international lawyers” through obituaries. Leiden Journal of International Law, 34 (1). pp. 67-91. ISSN 0922-1565
Abstract
Since Oscar Schachter’s famous articulation of the concept, scholars have attempted to know more about the composition and functioning of the ‘invisible college of international lawyers’ which makes up our profession. They have done this though surveying public rosters of certain sections of the profession (arbitrators, International Court of Justice counsel), providing general anecdotal accounts about informal connections between members, or establishing certain individuals’ influence in the development of discrete legal concepts. Departing from these approaches, we use the obituaries published in the British Yearbook of International Law (1920-2017) to draw a map of the ‘invisible college of international lawyers’. Obituaries are a unique window into international law’s otherwise private inner life, unveiling professional connections between international lawyers and their shared career paths beyond a single academic or judicial institution. Employing network analysis, a method commonly used in social sciences to describe complex social phenomena such as this, we are able to demonstrate the ubiquity of informal networks whereby ideas move, and provide evidence of the community’s homogeneity. Exploring the connections between international lawyers and their shared characteristics in this novel way, we shed light on the features of the community and the impact individual personalities have on the law. These characteristics of the profession and its members may be obvious to insiders, but are seldom acknowledged. Graphic representation is a powerful tool in bolstering critiques for diversity and contestation of mainstream law-making narratives. More than an exercise in exhaustive mapping, we seek to take the ‘dead white men’ trope to an extreme, provoking the reader to question the self-image of the profession an impersonal expert science.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 The Authors. This is an author produced version of a paper accepted for publication in Leiden Journal of International Law (LJIL). Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Keywords: | communities of practice; international law; invisible college; legal history; social network analysis |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Law (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 28 Oct 2020 14:20 |
Last Modified: | 01 Feb 2022 13:35 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press (CUP) |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1017/S0922156520000667 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:165607 |
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Filename: LSP-NR obits NEW Draft Clean 16 09 2020.pdf
Licence: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0