The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

On a summer afternoon in 1928, world leaders assembled in Paris to outlaw war. Within a year, the treaty signed that day, known as the Peace Pact, was ratified by nearly every state in the world. War, for the first time in history, had become illegal. Within a decade, the states that signed the pact were again at war, and as a result many dismissed the pact as folly. 

In their new book The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that this dismissal was mistaken, and that the pact ushered in a sustained march towards peace. While doing so, they tell the history of how the pact came to be and of the lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals whose ideas have shaped our understanding of war’s role in a just world order. 

Oona Hathaway is the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law and Counselor to the Dean at the Yale Law School. She is also Professor of International Law and Area Studies at the Yale University MacMillan Center, on the faculty at the Jackson Institute for International Affairs, and Professor of the Yale University Department of Political Science. In 2014-15, she took leave from Yale Law School to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel for National Security Law at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. She is, with Scott J. Shapiro, the author of The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World. 

Scott J. Shapiro is the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School. He joined the Yale Law faculty in July 2008 as a professor of law and philosophy. He previously taught law and philosophy at the University of Michigan and before that, was a professor of law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He is the author of Legality (2011) and editor (with Jules Coleman) of The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law (2002).  

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Books will be available for purchase using a credit card or check. For more information on the book, please visit the link here. 

PARTICIPANTS 

Oona Hathaway, @oonahathaway 
Professor of International Law, Yale Law School
Author, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World 

Scott J. Shapiro, @scottjshapiro 
Professor of Law and Philosophy, Yale Law School
Author, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World 

MODERATOR 

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America