State Responsibility and Rebels
The History and Legacy of Protecting Investment Against Revolution

Explores the emergence and contestation of State responsibility for rebels in the context of the decolonisation of Latin America.

Kathryn Greenman (Author)

9781316517291, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 August 2021

256 pages
23.5 x 15 x 1.9 cm, 0.52 kg

'Greenman is a legal historian, not a sociologist, but her study is of acute interest to both legal scholars and the emerging body of political science scholarship on the social and professional variables that structure international law as a professional market. Greenman's study provides a welcome prequel to sociological accounts of the boom of international arbitration from the 1970s oil crises onwards and the subsequent predominance of the model of the Wall Street multinational corporate law firm as a vehicle of legal globalization.' Sara Dezalay, Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History

This book traces the emergence and contestation of State responsibility for rebels during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In the context of decolonisation and capitalist expansion in Latin America, it argues that the mixed claims commissions-and the practices of intervention associated with them-served to insulate economic order against revolution, by taking the question of who assumed the risk of harm by rebels out of the scope of national authority. The jurisprudence of the commissions was contradictory and ambiguous. It took a lot of interpretive work by later scholars and codifiers to rationalise rules of responsibility out of these shaky foundations, as they battled for the meaning and authority of the arbitral practice. The legal debates were structured around whether the standard of protection against rebels owed to aliens was nationally or internationally determined and whether it was domestic or international authority that adjudicated such standard-a struggle over the internationalisation of protection against rebels.

1. The past and present of state responsibility for rebels
2. The system: mixed claims commissions in the shadow of empire
3. The cases: autonomy, ambiguity and doctrine in the work of the commissions
4. The scholarship: resistance and development
5. The codification projects: stalemate
6. The legacy: protecting investment against revolution in the decolonised world.

Subject Areas: Public international law [LBB], Legal history [LAZ], Law [L]