Vik Kanwar

Boston College, Boston College Law School, Faculty Member

Jindal Global Law School, Law, Faculty Member

Southwestern Law School, Law, Faculty Member

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Prof. Vik Kanwar joined Boston College Law School in 2021 as Director of Graduate and Global Programs. He previously held a similar position at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. From 2009-2016, he was Associate Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School in India and founding Executive Director of the Centre on Public Law and Jurisprudence (CPLJ), a research center dedicated to the application of legal and philosophical thought to pressing social problems including the crisis of delays in the courts, corruption in public administration, and the recourse to extrajudicial honor killings in local communities. In parallel, he was the co-founder of the Winter School on Art/Law, a unique initiative connecting artists and art world practitioners to comparative doctrines on resale royalties, fiduciary duties, and free expression, among other issues. In his teaching and in his writing, Professor Kanwar conceptualizes law as an expression of normativity, coercion, culture, and value.

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Papers by Vik Kanwar

Inquisition and the Birth of Inquiry: Fragments of a Genealogy

Social Science Research Network, 2000

This is a short draft of a genre article modeled on the works of Michel Foucault connecting scien... more

The Legislator of Last Resort: Security Council's Emerging Role in WMD Proliferation Crises

Social Science Research Network, 2007

This paper seeks to describe the United Nations Security Council's evolving legal role in reg... more This paper seeks to describe the United Nations Security Council's evolving legal role in regulating the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons. For all its formal power the Security Council is still bound by law and its actions are still framed in terms of international law, not pure political considerations. The Security Council is a waking giant in the field of non-proliferation and the implications and opportunities for its involvement have yet to be explored. Even if there is plenty of room for disagreement on more general policy perspectives - whether to strengthen or delimit the Security Council's capabilities in the area of non-proliferation or simply to increase its legitimacy - attention to the relevant legal architecture is the place to start.

A Fugitive from the Camp of the Conquerors: The Revival of Equal Sovereignty Doctrine in Shelby County v. Holder

Social Science Research Network, Oct 6, 2013

, who not only invited me to participate in this symposium, but also introduced me to the area of... more

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Book Review: Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of ‘Genocide’ and ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2016)

Social Science Research Network, Apr 6, 2018

Transnational Art Law—Maps and Itineraries

The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law

This chapter asks how best to frame a field of study called “transnational art law” (TAL). If art... more This chapter asks how best to frame a field of study called “transnational art law” (TAL). If art law encompasses all legal aspects of the production, distribution, and transaction of art, as well as any other rights and obligations governing art world actors and works of art, then transnational art law is the framework of legal knowledge necessary to understand these relationships and transactions across borders. Following the Transnational Law framework proposed by Philip Jessup in 1956, TAL would not be restricted to public or private, national or international, substantive or procedural law, but intervene in problem spaces involving all of these. It would capture the transnational actors, norms, and processes, the formal and informal interactions that constitute the art world. This chapter sketches TAL in its possible doctrinal, policy, regulatory, and advocacy dimensions, and suggests some openings for interdisciplinary study in particular.

The Concept of Coercion in International Law

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2011

At the last ESIL conference, Professor Jacob Cogan has contrasted Theodor Meron has called the hu... more At the last ESIL conference, Professor Jacob Cogan has contrasted Theodor Meron has called the humanization of international law with what he calls-the-coercive turn‖ in international law. These are possible contributors to the book) 2 Bin Cheng, General Principles of Law as Applied by International Courts and Tribunals, Cambridge University Press (1953). Bin Cheng leads his study of general principles of law with-self-preservation,‖ relegating-necessity‖ as the first subsection of this principle (others being self-help, self-defense, etc.). The author begins his discussion with the principle of salus populi is a general principle of law. The ancient right of self-preservation underlies the modern versions of derogability, self-defense, duress, military necessity and in more limited circumstances state of necessity.

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Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Stato di eccezione). Translated by Kevin Attell. University of Chicago Press, 2005. 104 pages

International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2006

Agamben was specifically protesting the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Tech... more Agamben was specifically protesting the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program, a biometric policy mandating automatic fingerprinting and photographing of all foreign visitors except nationals of twenty-seven U.S. allies. The program went into effect January 5, 2004. Less than a week later, Agamben announced the cancellation of his visit in an op-ed, Non au tatouage biopolitique [Say No to Biopolitical Tattooing], LE MONDE, Jan. 11, 2004, Point de vue.

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The Politics of Necessity: Doctrines and Discourses of the 'Salus Populi' in Public International Law

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2006

... of the following colloquia at NYU: ―Law and Philosophy‖ (Ronald Dworkin, Jurgen Habermas, and... more

Spring Forward, Fall Back: How R2P Won the War and Lost the Law Somewhere over Libya

The Libyan conflict pushed forward the debate on the status and coherence of the Responsibility t... more The Libyan conflict pushed forward the debate on the status and coherence of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as a legal rather than ethico-political norm. States and other actors expressed concerns that the NATO-led mission went beyond the mandate issued in Security Council Resolution 1973, focusing on regime change rather than solely civilian protection. This Article explores the possibility that International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and more particularly, Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions (CA1) provides the constraining language that should have been incorporated in the Security Council’s resolution. While CA1's language "respect and ensure respect" may seem just as general and open-ended as "responsibility to protect", it is argued here that R2P language was used to amplify and distort, rather than limit any mandate, and that even a modest reference to the applicable law (IHL) would have aimed at the opposite effect. While this counter-proposal...

Book Review: Karl-Heinz Ladeur’s Public Governance in the Age of Globalization

This is a Book Review of Karl-Heinz Ladeur's edited volume, PUBLIC GOVERNANCE IN THE AGE OF G... more

Politics and the Wealth of Nations: Hans Morgenthau, Adam Smith and the Shadow of Jurisprudential Thought in the Births of Two International (Non-Law) Disciplines

Adam Smith and Hans Morgenthau are widely recognized as the Fathers of two disciplines internatio... more Adam Smith and Hans Morgenthau are widely recognized as the Fathers of two disciplines international that are even today the chief rivals to a legalistic approach to world affairs. It is significant, then, that both scholars wrote and taught international law and jurisprudence just before crafting their comprehensive theories. Smith taught jurisprudence in Scotland just before writing Wealth of Nations, the revolutionary text of liberal political economy, and Morgenthau was a scholar of international law in Germany before emigrating to the United States, writing Politics Among Nations and founding the “American” sub-discipline of political science known as “international relations.” Today their legacies are contested, and viewed as ideological within the disciplines they founded, even as they provide the basic epistemological bases for their disciplines. Similarities do not end there. Both rejected law and morals as adequate to a science that would identify the rational course for a...

Difficulties for Every Solution

The Many Lives of Transnational Law

Not a Place, But a Project: Bandung, TWAIL, and the Aesthetics of Thirdness

“The Third World was not a place. It was a project,” writes Vijay Prashad in his book the Darker ... more “The Third World was not a place. It was a project,” writes Vijay Prashad in his book the Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. Yet the name so often given to that project is also the name of a place: Bandung, the site of the 1955 Asian-African Conference at Bandung regarded as having been the birthplace of both the nonaligned movement and the Third World. In the 60 years since Bandung, as the postcolonial planned state in its original form continues to disappear or disappoint, one might ask what remains of the Bandung Project. Centering on a discussion of two contemporary outcomes of the Bandung Project — the artworks at the Bandung Pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennial, and the intellectual movement known as TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) — this essay will both specify and expand upon the sense in which Bandung remains a project subject to constant reinvention. By focusing on alternative lineages of the Bandung project outside the realms of the political and state-based, it will be possible to foreground aesthetic aspects of Bandung, where non-alignment is understood as a kind of “third-ness” and where post-nationalism is evident in a negotiation between site-specificity and trans-locality, and where solidarities are formed not between nation-states but cities and circuits. In this way, the successors expand both the sense of “the project” but also the sense of “place” in what may still be called the Third World.

Globalization of legal knowledge

This work is the editors forward for the O.P. Jindal Global University Research Paper no- 2/2011

Friends, Enemies, and the Fog of Foreign Relations: How ‘Political Question’ Doctrines Thwart the Development of a Principled Alien Tort Jurisprudence

The political question doctrine, in its various forms, mediates the use of public power, includin... more The political question doctrine, in its various forms, mediates the use of public power, including the power of the court to decide certain cases. This has led to various debates about scope of this preclusion, and whether courts can fulfill their role reviewing the constitutionality of actions by the political branches without improperly encroaching on their policy space. The doctrine does not, however, preclude civil actions between private litigants, including most cases brought under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). Why then have federal courts so routinely refused to hear ATS cases, citing the principle that they raise non-justiciable political questions? In the case Corrie v. Caterpillar, for example, no constitutional challenge was made to any branch of government, nor was the court asked to overturn policy judgments of the political branches. Yet the case was dismissed under the political question doctrine. One possibility, frequently cited, is that such cases touch upon issues...

Civilization by Numbers: Indicators and Earlier Techniques of 'Standardization' in Global Governance

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, publicists of international law, among others, described th... more In the 19th and early 20th centuries, publicists of international law, among others, described the performance and states by reference to a ‘standard of civilization.’ The exclusive club of ‘civilizied' nations defined others and its standards were supposedly high, though these were unevenly defined. Can we compare two phases of 'standardization?': (1) the "standard of civilization" referred to within the European Public Law in this earlier period with (2) the modern method of indicators and benchmarking in global governance or governmentality? There is a competitive market in notions of civilization, today packaged as 'quanti-facts.'

Re-Tooling the Rule of Law: Instrumentalism and the Implementation of Humanitarian Law in Failed and Fragile States

This Paper, commissioned by the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflcit Resolution at Harvard... more This Paper, commissioned by the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflcit Resolution at Harvard University as a part of a series on new approaches to the implementation of International Humanitarian Law ("IHL"), will explore possible options for the application and implementation of IHL in contexts of impaired sovereignty. In legal terms, the specific point of entry is provided by Common Article 1 ("CA1") of the Geneva Conventions, which calls on all parties to "respect" and "ensure respect" for international humanitarian law "in all circumstances." This Article will gather what few opinions have been generated from experts in IHL on its applicability and implementation in such circumstances, and contextualize the emergence of "instrumentalist" or "ad hoc" options in light of the textual sources of obligations in the Geneva Conventions. Provisionally, it can be observed that CA1 plays two roles: (I) as an enabli...

12(B), or Not 12(B)?: Heightened Pleading Requirements and Procedural Barriers to Alien Tort Cases

As watchers of the U.S. Supreme Court await a dramatic judgment in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleu... more As watchers of the U.S. Supreme Court await a dramatic judgment in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. deciding on corporate liability and extra-territorial application of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a quieter erosion of ATS litigation is already underway in the sphere of civil procedure. Since its rediscovery in the 1980s as a tool to vindicate human rights, the ATS has come up against numerous procedural hurdles, including matters of jurisdiction and justiciability. In general, though, it has benefited from liberal pleading requirements under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) (especially Rule 8(a)(2) requiring only 'a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief') and the corresponding difficulty of dismissing the claims under one of the 12(b)s. Yet following two U.S. Supreme Court decisions -- Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly (2007) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal (2009) - federal courts seem convinced that pleading requirements ar...

Solidarity by Rupture: Anti-Liberalism, Long Lost Longings, and Lessons from Our Evil Twins

The organizers of this conference invite us to ask, “What are the blindspots and biases of those ... more The organizers of this conference invite us to ask, “What are the blindspots and biases of those critical approaches themselves, and how might a radical international law overcome them?” The repertoire of anti-liberal critique, whether borrowing gestures from Nietzsche or Marx, whether positioned from the Right or Left, is constrained by a limited number of critical moves. This form of critique, in all its forms, is defined against a moving target called “liberalism” which sometimes comes within the same line of fire as a target called “international law.” There is an image of liberal closure that radically diverse strains of critique — luddite or futurist, scholarly or illiterate, authoritarian, self-disciplined or libertarian, post-colonial, ambivalent, fundamentalist, and apollonian, Dionysian, revanchist, revolutionary, reactionary, restorationist, revisionist, promethean, hip and critical, hypocritical, chauvinist, multicultural, primordialist, anarchist, fascist, or aboriginal...

Editors’ Foreword: The Globalization of Legal Knowledge

The JGLR aspires to serve as a significant platform “for developing an alternative vision” on the... more The JGLR aspires to serve as a significant platform “for developing an alternative vision” on the discourse “of” and “about” law in the Global South. Even the process of publication underlines this global approach. With articles written in Argentina, South Africa, India, and Nigeria, as well as France, England, and the United States – and edited in China, Thailand, and Australia, among other sites – the JGLR tilts the debate on globalization towards its reality as a robust process that is multidirectional, reciprocal, and recursive. In every case, the contributors offer original research of the highest order in diverse fields of inquiry, raising issues of the global transmission of legal knowledge and authority. Although the present volume was not originally intended to be a “thematic” issue, we have titled it to note the various ways that these articles perform or remark upon The Globalization of Legal Knowledge.

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Inquisition and the Birth of Inquiry: Fragments of a Genealogy

Social Science Research Network, 2000

This is a short draft of a genre article modeled on the works of Michel Foucault connecting scien... more

The Legislator of Last Resort: Security Council's Emerging Role in WMD Proliferation Crises

Social Science Research Network, 2007

A Fugitive from the Camp of the Conquerors: The Revival of Equal Sovereignty Doctrine in Shelby County v. Holder

Social Science Research Network, Oct 6, 2013

, who not only invited me to participate in this symposium, but also introduced me to the area of... more

Download

Book Review: Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of ‘Genocide’ and ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2016)

Social Science Research Network, Apr 6, 2018

Transnational Art Law—Maps and Itineraries

The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law

The Concept of Coercion in International Law

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2011

Download

Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Stato di eccezione). Translated by Kevin Attell. University of Chicago Press, 2005. 104 pages

International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2006

Download

The Politics of Necessity: Doctrines and Discourses of the 'Salus Populi' in Public International Law

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2006

... of the following colloquia at NYU: ―Law and Philosophy‖ (Ronald Dworkin, Jurgen Habermas, and... more

Spring Forward, Fall Back: How R2P Won the War and Lost the Law Somewhere over Libya

Book Review: Karl-Heinz Ladeur’s Public Governance in the Age of Globalization

This is a Book Review of Karl-Heinz Ladeur's edited volume, PUBLIC GOVERNANCE IN THE AGE OF G... more

Politics and the Wealth of Nations: Hans Morgenthau, Adam Smith and the Shadow of Jurisprudential Thought in the Births of Two International (Non-Law) Disciplines

Difficulties for Every Solution

The Many Lives of Transnational Law

Not a Place, But a Project: Bandung, TWAIL, and the Aesthetics of Thirdness

Globalization of legal knowledge

This work is the editors forward for the O.P. Jindal Global University Research Paper no- 2/2011

Friends, Enemies, and the Fog of Foreign Relations: How ‘Political Question’ Doctrines Thwart the Development of a Principled Alien Tort Jurisprudence

Civilization by Numbers: Indicators and Earlier Techniques of 'Standardization' in Global Governance

Re-Tooling the Rule of Law: Instrumentalism and the Implementation of Humanitarian Law in Failed and Fragile States

12(B), or Not 12(B)?: Heightened Pleading Requirements and Procedural Barriers to Alien Tort Cases

Solidarity by Rupture: Anti-Liberalism, Long Lost Longings, and Lessons from Our Evil Twins

Editors’ Foreword: The Globalization of Legal Knowledge

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Epilogue Difficulties for Every Solution Defining Transnational Law at the Edge of Transdisciplinarity

The Many Lives of Transnational Law: Critical Engagements with Jessup’s Bold Proposal. Edited by Peer Zumbansen, Cambridge University Press, 2020

his is an epilogue to a volume commemorating 60 years since Philip Jessup’s “definition” of Trans... more his is an epilogue to a volume commemorating 60 years since Philip Jessup’s “definition” of Transnational Law. Unsurpassed for its citablity and quotability, Jessup's concept was nonetheless formed within a particular context of intellectual history. It has inspired three intellectual projects, called here Transnational Legal Process, Transnational Legal Theory and Transnational Legal Orders. This book is most clearly a mapping and an itinerary of the middle category, Transnational Legal Theory. The distance traveled between Jessup’s conception and the one presented here is most evident in a new definition offered in the Introduction by its editor which rather than acting as a prompt or a distillation, is an unpacking of the essential features of Transnational Law as an critical and intellectual project. Along with its rival itineraries, its moves toward interdisicplinarity, criticality, and legal pluralism move us not towards a consensus concept, but a transdisciplinary horizon.

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Transnational Art Law: Maps and Itineraries

Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law, 2020

This chapter asks how best to frame a field of study called "transnational art law" (TAL). If art... more This chapter asks how best to frame a field of study called "transnational art law" (TAL). If art law encompasses all legal aspects of the production, distribution, and transaction of art, as well as any other rights and obligations governing art world actors and works of art, then transnational art law is the framework of legal knowledge necessary to understand these relationships and transactions across borders. Following the Transnational Law framework proposed by Philip Jessup in 1956, TAL would not be restricted to public or private, national or international, substantive or procedural law, but intervene in problem spaces involving all of these. It would capture the transnational actors, norms, and processes, the formal and informal interactions that constitute the art world. This chapter sketches TAL in its possible doctrinal, policy, regulatory, and advocacy dimensions, and suggests some openings for interdisciplinary study in particular.

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Vik Kanwar

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