A Canon Event

Now twelve years ago, Völkerrechtsblog was founded with the goal of using the tools provided by the internet to challenge existing publication formats for international legal scholarship. While books, journal articles, edited volumes and the like are of course central fora for the dissemination of international legal thought, the founders of Völkerrechtsblog found these often lacking in inclusivity and accessibility, reinforcing academic hierarchies of who is read, and by whom. Due to the blog’s specific origins in German legal academia, the idiosyncrasies of that space provided an especially pertinent background for the blog’s development – notably regarding what both the founders and subsequent generations of editorial team members did not want the blog to become.

The German legal publishing space is perhaps best characterized through the importance of the “Festschrift” (liber amicorum), edited volumes published most often on the occasion of an eminent scholar’s birthday. Festschriften tend to feature a collection of contributions by the jubilee’s pupils (usually already professors in their own right) loosely related to his (there are still precious few Festschriften for female legal scholars) areas of expertise, as well as his photograph and a complete list of his publications. In many ways, the hierarchy and exclusivity of the German legal academic tradition congeal in this format: the Festschrift offers a celebration of one person’s achievements corresponding to the archetype of the lone, typically white and male, genius, but also creates an academic, typically patrilineal family tree in line with the standard question “Von wem kommt der/die?” (“Who does he/she come from?”). Additionally, as a form of academic discussion and knowledge dissemination, the Festschrift often falls short: contributions to a Festschrift can be less visible even to those scholars for whom they might be of thematic interest than if they were published in a relevant journal or in an edited volume built more distinctly around a topic rather than a person.

Against this background, now already some three or four years ago, a team of Völkerrechtsblog editors started thinking about how to celebrate the blog’s first decade of existence while continuing the blog’s mission of challenging established ways of doing legal academic publishing. After much discussion, the idea for a daring experiment was born: Can we take the concept of a Festschrift – and turn it on its head? Can we celebrate an idea and a community instead of individuals and practice inclusion instead of exclusion? Can we take the physical book, a medium we have little experience with, and play with its form to make it our own? Can we translate the blog’s commitment to a diversity of voices to this space?

What followed was a multi-year effort on behalf of a considerable group of editors to conceptualize and realize this – at times admittedly ridiculous-seeming – idea. We set out to assemble a diverse array of contributors and coax them – not always successfully – into trying out formats outside of the standard written article. Authors were free in choosing their citation styles and the “voice” they wanted to give to their texts – whether scientific, essayistic, personal, or a blend of everything. Additionally, we took a page out of Verfassungsblog’s Verfassungsbooks (and were immensely supported by its former Head of Publishing Evin Dalkilic!) and decided that our volume would have to be self-published in order to divest the project from traditional publishing and stay as independent as possible. In addition to Evin, the editors are immensely indebted to Henry Wilke, who provided invaluable layouting and design expertise.

The result are over a dozen contributions by nine editors and sixteen authors spanning well over 250 pages and featuring, among other things, a podcast, interviews, and, in lieu of a preface, an assemblage of e-mails, chat conversations, and internal planning documents chronicling the process of bringing the Festschrift into being.

The book is structured into four sections. Part I offers critiques of prevalent hierarchies in legal academia and beyond by Amaka Vanni, Humphrey Sipalla, and Anna Hankings-Evans. Part II addresses idiosyncrasies of academic writing and publishing, with contributions by Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín, Wanshu Cong, and Ralph Janik. In Part III, texts by Ginevra Peruginelli and Rohini Sen and an interview with Felicitas Strickmann center the ever-relevant issue of open(ing) access. Looking into the future, Part IV features thoughts by Charmaine Voigt, Birte Kuhle, Daniela Rau, Leopold Raab and Dana Schmalz regarding the role of blogs for science communication as well as a delightful recorded conversation with Başak Etkin and Kostia Gorobets about international law podcasting.

We have chosen the title “Reflecting and Disordering. Writing Ten Years of Völkerrechtsblog into History”. After all, alternative formats such as Völkerrechtsblog cannot expect to become part of the established canon any time soon, and maybe should not strive to do so. But the blog and its community can start writing its own history: not a neat, clean account of success and growth, but a multi-faceted, sometimes messy, even contradictory collection of voices. A history from which different readers will glean different things and which, although calcified into a physical collection of pages, can never stay frozen in time but always reflects the moment of its writing and of its being read at least as much as the times it seeks to chronicle.

Did the experiment succeed? Did we turn the Festschrift on its head or succumb to the lure of establishment and lineage? Let us know if, upon reading the Festschrift, you happen to form an opinion on this! We are still not sure, and maybe, sitting in that tension, we are right where we need to be, and where we have been since 2014.

You can order a physical copy of the Völkerrechtsblog Festschrift here or in your local bookstore (ISBN: 978-3-565428-00-7). It is available digitally as a whole here (DOI: 10.17176/20260309-102250-0), as well as the individual chapters here: 

Preface

Part I: Critique of Hierarchies in Legal Academia and Beyond

Race in German Legal Scholarship: Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back

A Critique of Hierarchies in the Legal Academy

Blackness, Respectability Politics and Policing in Legal Academia

Part II: Idiosyncrasies of Academic Writing and Publishing

Introduction

Always Walking towards the Horizon: Publishing, and Perishing, as an Early Career Scholar in International Law

Journeying through Alienation and Empowerment in Academic Publishing

The Case for (International Law-) Blogging: Dissemination, Communication and Challenging Hierarchies

Part III: Open Access and Opening Access

Opening Access via Open Access?

Unveiling access to legal information: Navigating complexities and prospects in the digital sphere

Digital Public Infrastructures and the Right to Know

Opening ‘Access’ and Accessing the ‘Open’

Part IV: Outreach and Teaching

Introduction

Reaching out with science blogs and podcasts. An insight into the Wi4impact research project

The (in)significance of blogs in legal education. Some thoughts from a student perspective

International Law Podcasts

Völkerrechtsblog – from start-up to establishment?