It was a great privilege to know Professor Charity Scott. I first met her when I was finishing Emory University’s joint law and public health program in the early 2000s, through the Office of General Counsel at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in the early days of CDC’s Public Health Law Program, now the Office of Public Health Law Services. In those days, introductions were generous and frequent for excited students beginning their careers, but meeting Professor Scott made an impression on me. She was the first and only female health law professor in the field that I had the opportunity to know in the early years of my career.

One particularly intense critical debate over interpretation in international law concerns the role of moral factors – specifically, the degree to which such factors influence legal interpretation, and how the law should deal with them. A formalist approach argues that moral considerations should be excluded as non-legal; a critical legal studies approach suggests they are an inevitable part of the functioning of international law and must therefore be acknowledged; and an inclusivist approach would suggest their influence is permissible, albeit only under certain circumstances. In this article, we are concerned with the question of whether moral factors influence interpretation at all, taking international treaties as the object of study. To address this question, we take a novel approach, proposing an experimental linguistic framework to test whether linguistic categorizations (originally developed for the analysis of everyday language) can be successfully applied to treaty interpretation, relying on both laypersons and experts as participants. Although some caveats must be made, the experiments deliver clear results: both groups are influenced by morals in their interpretation of international treaty norms. On this basis, we draw conclusions regarding (i) how the process of interpretation of international law operates; and (ii) what the institutions managing that process, such as courts, should factor-in when deliberating their decisions. By adopting this novel perspective, we also contribute to linguistic and experimental approaches to international law at the methodological level.

This paper examines the reciprocal interplay between Peter Fitzpatrick's life and work, between significant people, events, ideas and values, and the ways in which he made and re-made himself. It illuminates Peter's struggle, especially from the 1990s onwards, to place ethics centre stage in both life and law. Drawing on archival and secondary research, including interviews with Peter's family, former colleagues and students, this contribution to legal life writing adds to what we already knew about Peter and his scholarship. It assesses and clarifies his key ideas and their intersection with his ethics and lived experiences. It is hoped that the paper will encourage those who are less familiar with Peter's work, or who find his writing daunting, to tackle it anew and appreciate its significance.

I taught torts and legal profession at six US law schools over the course of forty years (1969–2008). This paper describes my efforts to incorporate socio-legal studies and critical legal studies into my teaching and my reflections on how successful this was.

At the heart of the constitutional theory of money is the argument that money is central to governance. This article explores the ways in which the core mechanism of the publicly undergirded monetary system, involving the incentivization and disciplining of private investors in the money creation process, creates its ‘fiscal value’ and generates both power struggles and possible instability in the unit of account. This twin dynamic of power and instability is intrinsic to a longue durée analysis of money. It is argued that since the current jural relations allocate money and power in particular ways, the basis is created for potential future political challenges to the status quo ante, thereby creating instability. Further, the article emphasizes the centrality of the indeterminacy criterion which is at the core of the critical legal studies (CLS) framework, and its intimate connection to Keynes's notion of uncertainty. The indeterminacy/uncertainty nexus is used to explore how currency stability is determined or undermined by expectations, power struggles, tax contestations, and broader policy frameworks. Finally, the article relates this monetary theory to the literature on state-led industrialization and shows how such a constitutional money theory of industrialization is an alternative to the New Institutionalist perspective which emphasizes the centrality of ‘clear and well-defined’ property and contracts in order to create an ‘efficient’ economy.

This article argues that contemporary international lawyers all sing the same critical refrain but few have really confronted and integrated the critical attitude deployed in From Apology to Utopia. After the denial and perplexity of the first encounters with Martti Koskenniemi's work, international lawyers came to feel that they have domesticated the perplexity provoked by it. They now all enthuse about the new self-reflectivity that their victorious struggle with From Apology to Utopia supposedly allowed them to acquire. In sum, the contemporary self-proclaimed self-reflective international lawyers, after reading From Apology to Utopia, have returned to business as usual, continuing to let the discipline's vocabulary decide on their behalf.

Research on political ideology in law and psychology can be fruitfully applied to the question of whether business ethics is ideological, and, if so, what response is warranted. I suggest that legal and psychological research streams can be drawn upon to create a new genre of critical business ethics that differs from normative and empirical business ethics. In psychology, Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) suggests how the mainstream ideology within an academic field can be criticized as a reflection of a self-righteous, us-them mind-set. In law, Critical Legal Studies (CLS) suggests how a field’s mainstream ideology can be criticized as a rationalization of the status quo. I suggest that the MFT and CLS criticisms of ideology can be joined to develop a critical approach to business ethics that seriously examines science on normatively charged topics, such as liberal-conservative differences and implicit attitudes, and that frames it in terms of alternative narratives.