Henry Jones

Biography

Henry Jones is Assistant Professor in Law in the Durham Law School and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Durham Law School.

Research Interest

My research focuses on the history and spatiality of international law, both its theory and practice. It addresses contemporary problems by revealing how things came to be this way, and how they could be different. My research to date has made two significant contributions within this framework. First, my research has uncovered the historic origins of key ideas of trade, property and morality in contemporary international law. This research is the subject of a forthcoming monograph based on the research conducted for my award winning PhD thesis. This research builds upon the existing history of the discipline, but pushes the historical focus back to the 17th century law of nations and the engagement between European empires. I argue that global regulation of trade, property and war had its origins in these colonial encounters and that both the shortcomings and the potential of international law have to be understood in this context. This work crucially adds a focus on legal practice to the existing work in the history of legal ideas. Second, my research aims to highlight questions of physical space in international law, a subject of growing academic interest and of immediate political concern. In the contemporary context of a global refugee crisis, a global financial crisis, and the hardening of boarders around the developed world, my research investigates the origins of international bordering and space demarcation. My article "Lines in the OCean" was the first output of this project. The article contributed a new history of the law of the sea focused on the production of legal space. I currently have two further outputs under consideration, the first a history of early demarcation of space on land, connecting up the legal process of enclosing private property with the political process of territorial control. The second is a theoretical engagement with legal geography and the potential contribution it can make to international law. All of this research is complementary to and complimented by my work with IBRU: Durham Centre fo Border Research, and in particular the consultation expertise I provide in International Borders and Border Disputes.