Abstract
Through focusing on the emergence of the British Yearbook of International Law in the inter-war peak of the British Empire, this chapter explores the genre of the international law yearbook through the figure of the archive, understood as both place and practice. Through the literal archive of the British Library, where the BYIL is held as required by municipal law, the yearbook’s first volume archives the emergence of a genre of international legal scholarship that set the paradigm for yearbooks to follow.
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Notes
- 1.
Foucault 1977a, at 144.
- 2.
Foucault 1977b, at 31.
- 3.
Garland 2014, at 372.
- 4.
- 5.
For example, Laura Bear describes India’s Eastern Railway Headquarters as ‘the medium through which social relations were contested and formed’ in the postcolonial state (Bear 2007, at 5); Anne Stoler regards the Dutch national archives as ‘an arsenal of sorts that were reactivated to suit new governing strategies’ (Stoler 2009, at 3).
- 6.
The British Library’s particular relationship to this practice can be traced back to the Statute of Anne (1710), which formalised the practice of legal deposit and extended it beyond the Bodleian Library collection in Oxford to the Royal Library, the British Library’s predecessor. The practice is governed legally by the Legal Deposit Libraries Act of 2003, which restates Section 15 of the Copyright Act 1911.
- 7.
Together with Hyo Yoon Kang, I distinguish between matters (as problematisations) and materials (as their constituent parts) in considering law’s materiality (Kang and Kendall 2020). Matters become legal matters (such as ‘jurisdiction’ or ‘evidence’), as do materials (such as texts), when they become ‘matters of concern’ to law; here the filed copy of the yearbook is a legal material by way of its relationship to the Legal Deposit Libraries Act of 2003, archived by law within the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom.
- 8.
I am grateful to medieval legal historian Karl Shoemaker for pointing out the existence of the ‘Year Book’ tradition in English common law.
- 9.
Seipp 1989, at 176.
- 10.
Seipp 1989, at 188.
- 11.
Lund 2015.
- 12.
Seipp 2004, at 77.
- 13.
Vismann 2008.
- 14.
Ives 1973.
- 15.
Ross 1998.
- 16.
Seipp 2004, at 74.
- 17.
Bentwich contends that under British occupation, the reformed Court of First Instance ‘has made criminal justice, which was notoriously halting and uncertain in the Ottoman regime, almost a model of expedition and certainty’ (1920, at 142). He further highlights British ‘expedition’ in moving from continental influence in procedure: ‘While the substantive law has been little affected, greater latitude has been taken with the amendment of the procedure. The Ottoman codes of procedure are rather slavish imitations of the French codes, and are not calculated to secure expeditious justice’ (146).
- 18.
Bentwich 1920, at 148.
- 19.
Dugard 1994, at 414.
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Kendall, S. (2021). Archiving Legality: The Imperial Emergence of the International Law Yearbook. In: Spijkers, O., Werner, W.G., Wessel, R.A. (eds) Netherlands Yearbook of International Law 2019. Netherlands Yearbook of International Law, vol 50. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-403-7_4
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