Jurists and the International

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how Italian legal scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to discourses of the international. It reconstructs the complexity and the meaning of international law in the Italian peninsula during this period, showing how jurists such as Pasquale Stanislao Mancini and Augusto Pierantoni made decisive contributions to the legal construction of the international by their political and scholarly works and by their involvement in the Institut de droit international. The chapter begins by providing an overview of the general context in which nineteenth-century international law emerged as a discipline. The next section elaborates the principle of nationality as conceived by Mancini and its implications for both private and public international law. The chapter then turns to the historical and comparative work done by Italian jurists to construct a field of international law and to conceptualize the international. The final section of the chapter discusses Italian jurists’ involvement in shaping colonial education, training, and administration through the creation of the Scuola Diplomatico-Coloniale (Colonial and Diplomatic School).