Harlan Grant Cohen, who is Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law, has contributed to a special symposium issue containing essays on International Law and the Politics of History, a book published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press and written by Melbourne Law School Professor Anne Orford.

Cohen’s essay, “Journeys through Space and Time While Reading International Law and the Politics of History, Found on a Palimpsest, Translated for You, the Reader,” appears at 36 Temple International & Comparative Law Journal 129 (2022) (SSRN).

The issue developed out of a spring 2022 workshop at Temple University Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia, organized by Temple Law Professor Jeffrey L. Dunoff. As described by Dunoff, Cohen’s essay appears in the issue’s “final cluster of papers,” which consider “disciplinary identities and the politics of the encounter between law and history. ” Dunoff continued:

“Cohen’s highly creative contribution takes the form of a dialogue between study partners attempting to understand a fragmentary portion of a text that purports to describe a conflict between a historian and a legal scholar. This dialogue — which both expressly refers to and is reminiscent of a hevrutah, or partner-based form of studying religious texts common in Jewish communities — defies efforts at summary.

“Suffice to say that it touches on a dazzlingly wide range of issues, including disciplinary identity, different forms of knowledge, competing theories of meaning, the limits of language, and the possibility of plural truths, among other topics.”

Contributing to the special symposium issue — in addition to Cohen, Dunoff, and Orford — were Natasha Wheatley, Afroditi Giovanopoulou, Kunal M. Parker, Morten Rasmussen, Megan Donaldson, Francisco-José Quintana and Sarah M.H. Nouwen, David Schneiderman, Karen J. Alter, Lauri Mälksoo, Oliver Diggelmann, and Steven Ratner.