Kate Parlett, The Individual in the International Legal System. Continuity and Change in International Law

Whether and where to locate the individual in the universe of international law has become a standard question for the discipline. While in the 19th and still in the early 20th centuries international legal doctrine could not see in the human person anything other than a mere object of international law,1 at the beginning of the 21st century, the individual presents itself as habitue of international law with major treatises dedicating a substantial number of pages, if not whole chapters to the topic.2 The last hundred years have thus witnessed a remarkable development which has shifted the individual s place in international law from the utmost periphery of the discipline to perhaps not its centre, but at least to its inner circles. Interestingly, a review of the pertinent literature does not reveal a constant increase in the output on the problem of the status of the individual in international law.3 There rather seem to exist market cycles with a first surge of academic interest in the matter rising from the end of the 1920s on, notably in the wake of the famous dictum of the Permanent Court of International Justice in the Jurisdiction of the Courts of Danzig case4 and lasting until well after World War II. The question seems to have attracted much less attention in the 1970s and 1980s in order to make way for the topic powerfully to resuscitate itself around the turn of the century. Kate Parlett's doctoral thesis on The Individual in the International Legal System is characterized by Parlett s supervisor, Professor Crawford, as the first general work on the individual's standing in international law since the 1960s (Foreword, at p. xiii) and thus fits well into this general trend. The book stands out as an equally ambitious and fertile contribution to

International law · Political science · Sociology · International Law and Human Rights · Law