Summary

In this session Lianne Boer (VU Amsterdam) will show how writers of international law are present in their texts. By this she means that international law is ‘written’ in significant part by its scholars – but they themselves often remain invisible in analyses of international law. In her research Lianne Boer seeks to show where and how legal writers manifest themselves in and through their writing. Concretely, Lianne Boer will discuss two ways in which this happens: metadiscourse, and the ‘plot’ of an individual piece of scholarship (an article, or book chapter).

Metadiscourse is that part of a text which seeks to structure it: e.g. ‘in this chapter I will argue’, or, ‘Section 3 deals with…’ Plot is a little more abstract: it indicates the management of suspense in a text and (following Peter Brooks) the ‘temporal unfolding’ of the narrative of a legal argument.

According to Lianne Boer both are ways in which the scholar in question manifests herself through her writing. Ultimately, Boer seeks to juxtapose this presence of the author with the idea of a ‘law out there’, brought ‘into’ an individual piece by the author in question.

The Speaker

Lianne Boer is Assistant Professor of Transnational Legal Studies at the Faculty of Law, VU Amsterdam, and a Research Fellow of the Centre for the Politics of Transnational Law. She was awarded her PhD cum laude in April 2017; her dissertation dealt with the (socio)linguistics of knowledge production in international legal scholarship. She teaches Politics of International Law (LLM) and is part of the programme board of the new Law in Society LLB at VU Amsterdam. In her current research she looks at international legal scholarship as a collection of narratives, featuring international law as the main character.

Practicalities

The lecture will take place at the Amsterdam School of Law, building REC A, room A3.01, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, Amsterdam.