Alberico Gentili, 'The Wars of the Romans: A Critical Edition and Translation of De armis Romanis'.

• Author: Antaki, Mark

Alberico Gentili, The Wars of the Romans: A Critical Edition and Translation of De armis Romanis, ed by Benedict Kingsbury & Benjamin Straumama, translated by David Lupher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Benedict Kingsbury & Benjamin Straumann, eds, The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Martin Loughlin, Foundations of Public Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Oxford University Press has recently released three books that, as their titles indicate, explicitly address the "foundations" of law. Foundations of Public Law is penned by Martin Loughlin; (1) it builds on and deepens his earlier work, particularly The Idea of Public Law. (2) It seeks to provide an account of the emergence and the characteristics of "public law", the modern successor to the medieval "fundamental law"; this "public law" constitutes, according to Laughlin, the "code" of an "autonomous public sphere" tied to the "intrinsically modern idea of the state." (3) Jointly edited by Benedict Kinsbury and Benjamin Straumann, The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of .Empire emerges from the History and Theory of International Law Program at NYU Law School. By way of the work of Alberico Gentili, its fifteen contributions consider "the extent to which early modern thinking about the law of nations and imperialism was influenced by the ideas and the historical record of the Roman Empire." (4) The work is accompanied by the first English-language translation and critical edition of Gentili's De armis Romanis. (5)

To inquire into "foundations" is to inquire into things we take for granted but without which we could not live in the world as we do. Most often, inquiring into foundations requires that we rethink how we live, how we talk about how we live, and the relationship between the two, the relations between our practices and our discourses. Loughlin explicitly casts his long, dense historical and theoretical project (6) in relation to "recent developments in the British system" that require that the British "reconnect with the mainstream European tradition of public law" to address "foundational questions" (7) The questions he is most interested in reviving are "questions of 'right' relating to the conferral of authority and legitimacy on modern governmental ordering"--these being the proper subject of "fundamental" or "public" law. (8) In particular, he claims that the British must revisit the standard belief that "following the Revolution of 1689...