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The purpose of this book series is to publish high quality volumes on the history of law and justice.Legal history can be a deeply provocative and influential field, as illustrated by the growth of the European universities and the ius commune, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and indeed all the great movements for national liberation through law. The study of history gives scholars and reformers the models and courage to question entrenched injustices, by demonstrating the contingency of law and other social arrangements.Yet legal history today finds itself diminished in the universities and legal academy. Too often scholarship betrays no knowledge of what went before, or why legal institutions took the shape they did. This series seeks to remedy that deficiency.Studies in the History of Law and Justice will be theoretical and reflective. Volumes will address the history of law and justice from a critical and comparative viewpoint. The studies in this series will be strong bold narratives of the development of law and justice. Some will be suitable for a very broad readership.Contributions to this series will come from scholars on every continent and in every legal system. Volumes will promote international comparisons and dialogue. The purpose will be to provide the next generation of lawyers with the models and narratives needed to understand and improve the law and justice of their own era.

Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950) undertook a re-interpretation of the modern origins of the discipline of international law, placing Vitoria at its pivot, as the Spanish international law professor Camilo Barcia Trelles (1888–1977) had done before. Barcia’s work had a strong influence on some of the seminal pieces on international law and geopolitics that Schmitt wrote in the period from 1941 to 1950. This was the case for Schmitt’s historical mythology of the opposition between sea and earth and its juridical consequence, his doctrine of the Grossraum, which had as its basis Barcia’s account of the Monroe Doctrine, and also of Schmitt’s critique of the ‘discrimination of war’ formalized in the Kellogg–Briand Pact. According to Barcia, the exclusion of European powers from the American continent by the United States as a rising hegemon was transformed – thanks to its domination of the sea – into the global reach of a world police power. Barcia did not agree with Brown Scott’s transformation of international law through American liberal internationalism into ‘modern international law’. While Brown Scott and Schmitt were competing for two opposing vernaculars of the discipline in search for a new definition and to shape it, Barcia was instrumental in the opposed efforts of these two apparently very dissimilar representatives of international law by ushering Vitoria into their service.

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