Francisco De Vitoria's Unexpected Transformations and Re-Interpretations for International Law

Abstract:     
Why is Francisco de Vitoria as hip as the iPad in International Legal Studies Today?. A review of some of the legacies of Vitoria in international legal scholarship today accompanies, in the first part of this work, a retrospective gaze at the first third of the Twentieth century so as to examine how the role played by the founder of the American Society of International Law, James Brown Scott, as the editor of The Classics of International Law, and his scholarly writings, contributed to (re)establish Francisco de Vitoria as the father of international law in the inter-war years. The second part provides, in its turn, a genealogy of the critical front of today’s Vitorian revival in international law. Special attention is, then, paid to some of the intellectual building-blocks and programmatic tenets which, since the late-1990s, have inspired a Third World Approaches to International Law’s (TWAIL) anti-imperial narrative of the international legal order along with a TWAIL’s re-interpretation and re-contextualization of the works of the Sixteenth century Prima professor of Sacred Theology at the University of Salamanca. The conclusion reflects on the lasting legacy of the Spanish Classics in the American tradition of international law in the Twentieth century.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 31

Keywords: Vitoria, International Law, American Tradition, Third World, Spanish Classics, Universalism, Empire

Accepted Paper Series