Evening lecture: Visual International Law and Imperialism: Painting and Building Universality and Authority - Dr Kate Miles

Lecture summary: Visual international law tells stories. Image and art supporting imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also projected the authority, legitimacy, and universality of international law. This lecture argues that depictions of treaty-making, international legal theorists, and conferences were about painting European international law as ‘successful’—telling stories of an authoritative, universal, and virtue-laden mode of international regulation. That same approach also stretched into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including through the physical construction of international law in the architecture of its statement buildings, such as the International Court of Justice. Dr Kate Miles is a Fellow, Lecturer and Director of Studies in Law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She is also a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge. She is the author of a monograph published by Cambridge University Press: The Origins of International Investment Law: Empire, Environment and the Safeguarding of Capital. She is also the author of a forthcoming monograph also with Cambridge University Press: Visual International Law: Image, Symbol, Art and Architecture. As an undergraduate in law and arts at the University of Auckland, she studied law, art history, philosophy and ancient history. She holds a B.A. in Art History, LL.B., and an LL.M. in Environmental Law (Hons I) from the University of Auckland, an LL.M. in International Legal Studies from NYU School of Law, and a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney. Since 2015, her research has drawn together those interdisciplinary threads and engaged with the visuality of international law. In particular, it has focused on the role of the visual in projecting the authority, legitimacy and universality of imperial international law.