Distinctions of Power and the Power of Distinctions: A Response to Professor Koskenniemi

Professor Koskenniemi’s erudite lecture, ‘Empire and International Law: The Real Spanish Contribution’ (UTLJ 61.1) examines the thinking of the Spanish scholastics from three perspectives. He offers a reconstructive interpretation of the reasoning that the Spanish scholastics engaged, a contextualization of the issues they took themselves to be addressing because of the context in which they wrote, and an account of the role that their reasoning served in subsequent rationalization of international law’s indifference to private power. In this brief response, I say both something about the distinction between these perspectives and something about the Scholastics’ signature distinction between the two forms of dominium, private property and public law.