The Law of Strangers
Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century

28th Jan 2020 by PhillipTaylor

A FASCINATING ANTHOLOGY ON THE LAW OF STRANGERS RECENTLY PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS An appreciation by Elizabeth Robson Taylor of Richmond Green Chambers and Phillip Taylor MBE, Head of Chambers, Reviews Editor, “The Barrister”, and Mediator As the editors, James Loeffler and Moria Paz, write in “The Law of Strangers”, “from the Nuremberg Trials to contemporary human rights, Jews have long played prominent roles in the making of international law”. This book from Cambridge University Press (CUP) examines “Jewish Lawyers and International Law in the Twentieth Century” as its subtitle suggests. However, the actual ties between Jewish heritage and legal thought remain a subject of mystery and conjecture even among specialists which is one of the motivations for this work. It all “grew out of a conversation between the editors that began at an Association of Jewish Studies conference panel in Boston many years ago”. To a certain extent, the book is really a legal history book. The fourteen contributors have been brought together to ponder what insights might emerge from exploring international legal history from “the particular perspective of the Jewishness of some of its most prominent makers in the century spanning the 1870 to the 1970s. What we get as a result of a long-running inquiry from their original conversation. There is an introduction and 14 chapters running to over 300 pages split into 7 parts. From the viewpoint of jurisprudence, we found chapters three and four in part II on Hans Kelsen particularly illuminating as many will have no idea of his immediate family or early childhood – his original name being Kohn or Cohen. As with the rest of the book, there is breath-taking research and attention to detail throughout with substantial footnoting of use to researchers. As the editors’ comment, this collection of biographical studies takes a unique interdisciplinary approach, pairing historians and legal scholars to explore how their Jewish identities and experiences shaped their legal thought and activism. They have used newly-discovered sources and sophisticated interpretative methods to give an alternative history of twentieth-century international legal profession – and “a new model to the emerging field of international legal biography” which will have relevance to a wide-ranging readership. We thought this an intriguing book giving us a concise statement in the following areas: the presentation of engaging biographical case studies that expand knowledge of key historical figures while contributing to larger questions about Jews and law engaging legal specialists, historians, and other scholars interested in the questions of religion, ethnicity, politics, and international law and illuminating the state of the field, and the emerging new directions in legal history, international law, and society studies. The hardback edition of this book was first published on 26th September 2019.

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