ABSTRACT
The pivotal contributions of private international law to the conceptual emergence of international human rights law have been largely ignored. Using the idea of adjacent possibility as a theoretical metaphor, this article shows that conflict of laws analysis and technique enabled the articulation of human rights universalism. The nineteenth-century epistemic practice of private international law was a key arena where the claims of individuals were incrementally cast as being spatially independent from their state of nationality before rights universalism became mainstream. Conflict of laws was thus a vital combinatorial ingredient contributing to the dislocation of rights from territory that underwrites international human rights today.
León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, A New History for Human Rights: Conflict of Laws as Adjacent Possibility, Journal of the History of International Law / Revue d’histoire du droit international. Online Publication Date: 30 January 2024.
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