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Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro on How the World Order Evolves

Guests

Oona Hathaway

Professor @YaleLawSch, Director @YaleLawGLC, Editor @just_security, fmr Special Counsel @DeptofDefense, co-author of The Internationalists

Scott Shapiro

Prof @YaleLawSch + Philosophy @Yale. Visiting Quain Prof @UCLLaws. Editor, Legal Theory and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. #Internationalists

Given how Xi today struts on the world stage with ambitions to use today’s “historic opportunity” to reshape the international order, its useful to look back in history to the last time the world faced a revolution in legal norms. Yale Law Professors Scott Shapiro and Oona Hathaway recently published The Internationalists, an intellectual history of how international legal norms have evolved since the days of Grotius. In particular, they focus on the movement to outlaw war peaking in the early 20th century with the Kellogg Briand Pact fundamentally reframed interstate relations and created many aspects of the modern international system China is navigating today. This discussion ranges from how Japan adopted to the western legal reality in the late 19th and early 20th century, to origins of sanctions, the South China Sea and even wars started by claims of wife-stealing.