A Lawyer in Exile: Johannes M. de Moor and the Circulation of Legal Knowledge in Wartime London

Abstract

De Moor’s biography illustrates how people and ideas travelled between and within national and transnational spaces. He played a role in the circulation of legal knowledge in the transnational epistemic community, more precisely between the Cambridge Commission and the London International Assembly. In thinking about the future of the international order and the place of nation states within it, De Moor came to embrace the idea that state sovereignty and the rule of law had to be recalibrated and that, as a logical conclusion, war crimes could be prosecuted internationally. In London, he became an advocate for a universal organization backed by an international court and an international armed force. He envisioned an international rule of law as the underlying system governing the international order.