The Gift of Realism: Julius Stone and the International Legal Academy in Australia

Abstract:     
Written for a forthcoming book (H. Irving, J. Mowbray & K. Walton (eds) Julius Stone: A Study in Influence (Federation Press, forthcoming), this chapter contributes to a series of studies seeking to gauge what has been made of the work of international lawyer and legal theorist Julius Stone. Among Stone’s possible intellectual progeny, this chapter focuses on an obstreperous and, at times, ungrateful brood: scholars and teachers of international law in Australia. Focusing on a forty year period from the 1954 publication of Stone’s first book-length work in international law, Legal Controls of International Conflict, this chapter begins an assessment of the influences - direct and indirect - of Stone’s work upon international legal scholarship in Australia. In so doing, this chapter uses Stone’s role and impact in international legal scholarship in Australia as a way of reflecting on two, broader sets of questions. First, to what extent or in what ways might the Australian legal academy be understood to have ‘received’ American legal realism? If, as Neil Duxbury would have it, American legal realism was more a ‘mood’ than a coherent movement, how has that mood featured in the affective, performative and constative repertoire of legal scholarship in Australia? Second, what might the life or lifelessness of American legal realism in the Australian academy (traced through a single capillary: the impact of Julius Stone’s version in international law), suggest about the vagaries and the stakes of legal transfer in the scholarly domain? What questions might this account pose for students of legal transfer working with the rubrics of ‘transplant’ (Watson), or ‘palace wars’ (Dezalay and Garth)?

Keywords: international law, sociological jurisprudence, legal realism, legal history, legal transplants, feminist international law

JEL Classifications: K10, K30, K33

Accepted Paper Series