Rethinking the First World War from the Perspective of International Law
Tuesday, November 26, 201312:00 PM - 1:30 PM (Pacific)
Central Conference Room, Encina Hall (2nd Floor)
About the Topic: Re-establishing and strengthening the rule of international law in
international affairs was a central Allied aim in the First World War. Revisionism in its many
forms has erased this from our memory, and with it the meaning of the war. Imperial
Germany’s actions and justifications for its war conduct amounted to proposing an entirely
different set of international-legal principles from those that other European states recognized
as public law. This talk examines what those principles were and what implications they had
for the legal world order.
About the Speaker: Isabel V. Hull received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1978 and
has since then been teaching at Cornell University, where she is the John Stambaugh
Professor of History. A German historian, her work has reached backward to 1600 and
forward to 1918 and has focused on the history of sexuality, the development of civil society,
military culture, and imperial politics and governance. She has recently completed a book
comparing Imperial Germany, Great Britain, and France during World War I and the impact
of international law on their respective conduct of the war. It will appear in Spring 2014
under the title, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law in the First World
War. Her talk is based on this latest research.