International Law and the Future of Freedom: A Posthumous Publication of John Barton’s Work

Barton8-15-02
Photo by Steve Gladfelter

The Bender Reading Room in Green Library is a beautiful place, peacefully looking over the Quad from the library’s top floor. On Wednesday afternoon April 30, it was home to a combined beginning and ending: Stanford University Press’s launch of the late John Barton’s posthumous book, International Law and the Future of Freedom.

John, JD ’68, George E. Osborne Professor of Law, Emeritus, died tragically in August 2009 after a bicycle accident. As his family sorted through his offices, they found that his last major writing project was very nearly done. They took the manuscript to the law school, where then-dean Larry Kramer helped arrange its publication by Stanford University Press. Helen M. Stacy, senior fellow of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and an expert in international human rights, did the heavy lifting in converting the “almost done” manuscript into a finished book, with a (very) little help from me. And then we both had the honor of co-writing an introduction to the book—and to the man.

The book is a fitting capstone to John’s career. He spent much of his scholarly life outside the mainstream of the American law school, whether pioneering with colleagues the innovative course Law in Radically Different Cultures or working with international governments and groups on specific problems, from arms control to improving important crops to assessing the effects of intellectual property law on the developing world. John engaged with the worlds of law, quasi-law, and policy far outside state and federal courtrooms, but almost always on tangible, concrete problems.

International Law and the Future of Freedom is not the result of such a project. It is big theory, among the biggest, on how international actors—both governments and a host of non-governmental ones—should act together to create a fair and functional international system. If it is dealing with a concrete problem, it is doing so on a very ambitious level indeed and pulling political theory, history, and philosophy into its service. The book is not one of John’s projects; it is, in a real sense, a summation of the wisdom he gained through all of his many international endeavors.

I miss John greatly, but I am very happy that—thanks to the efforts of his family, Helen Stacy, the law school, and the Stanford University Press—he has been able to give us one last gift. I only hope we can learn something useful from it, which I am sure was John’s greatest hope, too.