Francisco de Vitoria’s Unexpected Transformations and Reinterpretations for International Law

Abstract

Abstract A review of some of the legacies of Vitoria for international legal scholarship accompanies, in the first part, a retrospective gaze at the first third of the Twentieth century, in order to examine how the founder of the American Society of International Law, James Brown Scott, contributed to (re)establish Vitoria as the father of international law in the inter-war years. The second part provides a genealogy of the critical front of the Vitorian revival in international law today. Special attention is, then, paid to some of the intellectual building-blocks and programmatic tenets which have inspired a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) anti-imperial narrative of the international legal order along with a TWAIL’s re-interpretation and re-contextualisation of the works of the sixteenth century’s Prima professor of Sacred Theology at the University of Salamanca. The conclusion reflects on the lasting legacy of the Spanish Classics in the American tradition of international law.