International Law and Imagination

A conversation with Gerry Simpson and Andrea Bianchi

Often confined to the realms of artistic creation or fiction writing, imagination is seldom characterised by lawyers as being of importance to law in general, or international law in particular. One has to go outside the law to find out that law might be ‘the most powerful school of imagination’, or that the jurists may be inventing the real they deal with. In what ways is imagination relevant to international law? What are the power and limits of imagination when it comes to international law? Can we re-imagine international law in order to reshape our present and build alternative futures?

Gerry Simpson was appointed to a Chair in Public International Law at LSE in January 2016. He previously taught at the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University and LSE. He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004) and Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Polity 2007), and co-editor (with Kevin Jon Heller) of Hidden Histories (Oxford, 2014) and (with Raimond Gaita) Who’s Afraid of International Law?(Monash, 2016)

Andrea Bianchi is a Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute. He previously taught international law at the Catholic University of Milan, the University of Parma and the Bologna Centre of the Johns Hopkins University. His latest publications include International Law Theories (OUP 2016), "International Adjudication, Rhetoric and Storytelling" (Journal of International Dispute Settlement, 2017, vol. 9) and "The Unbearable Lightness of International Law" (forthcoming, London Review of International Law).

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