Law Commons^™

The Future Of International Law: Members' Reception And Plenary Panel, Georgetown University Law Center – Remarks By Lori Damrosch, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

It is a privilege to follow Judge Owada and to take up the challenge offered by the theme statement of this panel: to assess trends that we perceive to be shifting the future of international law, while also interrogating claims of their newness. Perhaps everything that we think of as new has some resonance with the past.

Property And Empire: The Law Of Imperialism In Johnson V. M'Intosh, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Chief Justice Marshall's opinion in Johnson v. M'Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823), has long been a puzzle, both in its doctrinal structure and in long, strange dicta which are both triumphal and elegiac. In this Essay, I show that the opinion becomes newly intelligible when read in the context of the law and theory of colonialism, concerned, like the case itself, with the expropriation of continents and relations between dominant and subject peoples.

I examine several instances where the seeming incoherence of the opinion instead shows its debt to imperial jurisprudence, which rested on a distinction between …