International law and humanitarian intervention

From the 1860s onwards, international law became an academic discipline in its own right in Europe and the Americas, taught separately from philosophy, natural law or civil law, and came to be written by professional academics or theoretically inclined diplomats.¹ Until then what existed was thedroit public de l’Europeor ‘external public law’. Britain in particular had to face the ‘spectre of Austin’,² who dominated British jurisprudence in the first part of the nineteenth century. For John Austin, ‘laws properly so called’ were ‘established directly by command’³ and those lacking command were ‘positive moral rules which are laws improperly