On 19 December 1899, the Tehran School of Political Science (Madrasa-ye ʿolum-e siāsi) opened its doors to the first cohort of students. Mostly of nobility backgrounds, these students were enrolled in a three-year program equivalent to an undergraduate degree. The program included various courses on history, geography, economics, foreign languages, and international law, among others.

The founder and first director of the school was Hassan Moshir-al-Molk Pirnia (1871-1935), the son of the minister of foreign affairs of Persia and a law graduate from Moscow. For him, the creation of a specialized school was aimed at training a skillful diplomatic corps for the ministry of foreign affairs. On the eve of the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11), the need to modernize and keep pace with a Eurocentric global order had augmented domestic demand for legal expertise, placing legalist projects at the center of intra-elite struggles.

In Persia, as in other peripheral states, importing European legal standards and expertise was seen as essential to maintaining political independence and gaining access to the family of nations. International law was pivotal to the School’s European-style curriculum and pedagogy. Not only did the teaching of international law precede the teaching of other branches of law but also some of the earliest works published by the School’s lecturers focused on international law.

The Rise of Modernist Lawyer-Politicians

The School of Political Science was the third-oldest institution of modern education in Iran, preceded only by Dār al-fonun (polytechnic college) and Madrasa-ye nezāmi (military college) founded, respectively, in 1851 and 1885. Compared to European-style institutions of legal education in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, this school was rather a latecomer in the Middle East. Its creation had transpired as a historical product of decades-long social class and power reconfigurations in the highest echelons of governance in Iran. Over the 19th century, gradual expansion of European-style bureaucracy resulted in the rise of a stratum of intelligentsia. Unlike traditional nobility, members of this social stratum derived their social distinction from the mixture of their patrician backgrounds with European credentials.

Coming from this stratum of intelligentsia, many leading Iranian lawyer-politicians of the early 20th century, such as Pirnia, Mohammad Mossadegh (1882-1967) and Ahmad Matine-Daftary (1897-1971) studied and taught at the School of Political Science and the School of Law (Madrasa-ye hoquq) created in 1919. With most disciplines of social sciences still in their embryonic stages of development in Iran, law had notably grown in importance within the reformist and modernist aura of post-revolutionary Persia. Echoing this legalist spirit, Mohammad-Ali Foroughi (1877-1942), one of the school’s lecturers, asserted that law was the “science of the polis” and the “most indispensable of all sciences and techniques”.¹

For most of the 19th century, the flow of cultural imports from the Ottoman and Russian empires played a vital role in shaping Iranian perceptions of modernity. By the turn of the century, with increasing direct contact between Iran and Europe, this influence had gradually dwindled. With France and French-speaking cantons of Switzerland as their study destinations, most Iranian lawyer-politicians were inspired by Francophone legal cultures, which they believed counterbalanced decades-long Russo-British supremacy in Persia. This French influence expanded over time. By the 1920s, the School of Political Science and the School of Law had developed into Francophone institutions in their structure, curriculum, and pedagogy.

Earliest Scholarly Works of International Law

By the end of the 19th century, Persia, relegated to a “semi-civilized” status and largely excluded from the European-dominated community of states, began to increasingly participate in major multilateral diplomatic conferences. Only a few months before the School was founded, the Persian government had sent a delegation to the Hague Peace Conference of 1899. Against this backdrop, Pirnia dedicated the first seminar of the nascent institution to public international law. His lectures were compiled and published as the first academic textbook of international law in Iran.² The content and structure of this book matched Friedrich Martens’ Traité de droit international (published in 1882-83),³ suggesting that Pirnia’s previous education in Russia had informed his choice of relevant sources.

Despite its Russian lineage, Pirnia’s textbook was replete with references to French terms and sources, reflecting the vital position of French-language scholarship for Pirnia’s institution-building project. This growing move towards French legal scholarship was exemplified by another Persian-language textbook of international law published a decade later by Mohammad Mazaher (known as Sadiq Hazrat).⁴ A lecturer of history and international law courses, he had completed his secondary education in Istanbul, followed by a law degree in Paris. The book, which appears to be a translation of a French handbook for students of the diplomatic service,⁵ was published in various editions over the next decades.

Besides these textbooks, this period saw the publication of other scholarly works on international law. In 1908, Hossein Motamen-al-Molk Pirnia (1875-1948), Hassan Pirnia’s younger brother and a law graduate from Paris, published the first Persian-language treaty collection.⁶ A lecturer of economics, he compiled the texts of treaties concluded between Persia and (non-)European states between the 17th and early 20th centuries, offering a uniform terminology for Persian equivalents of foreign terms.

In 1914, Mohammad Mossadegh, a lecturer of procedural law who had obtained his doctorate in law from Neuchâtel, published a treatise on the status of capitulations in Persia.⁷ Building on the end of extraterritoriality in Japan (1899) and the Ottoman Empire (1914), he argued that “a state which fails to make foreign nationals subject to its domestic jurisdiction […] may not deserve to rule over its own nationals.”⁸ In the quest for possible pathways to the abolition of capitulations in Iran, Mossadegh favored European-style legal codification and judicial modernization. In his view, these were not incompatible with Islamic law, which had to be adapted to the “exigencies of the time and the interests of mankind”.⁹

The Lasting Legacies of an Elite Institution

In the educational reforms of the 1920s, the School of Political Science merged with the School of Law, later forming the Faculty of Law, Political Science, and Economics of the University of Tehran (1934). These structural developments transformed small institutions tasked with training government bureaucrats into a single institution of mass education. An elite institution in its origins, the School of Political Science was an integral part of the complex history of the engagement of Iranian lawyer-politicians with state modernization and global diplomacy in the pre-WWI and interwar periods. It was in the pedagogical fabric of this institution that Iranian jurists began to reimagine international law as an object of scholarly reflection, and as an element of the institution-building and state modernization projects they undertook in the next decades.

A series of judicial reforms introduced in 1911 by Hassan Pirnia, then minister of justice, was followed by European-style legal codification in the 1920s and culminated in the abolition of capitulations in 1928. Following decades of exclusion from the international community, Iran joined the League of Nations in 1920. Leveraging the possibilities that the League system offered, Iran increasingly used the language of international law to express its historical grievances vis-à-vis imperial powers, including in its oil dispute with Britain in 1932-33. This generation of legalism, born in the intellectual aura of the School of Political Science and the School of Law, later outlived the political disruptions following the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in August 1941.

In the immediate post-WWII years, a coalition of prominent jurists of the interwar generation, notably Mossadegh, and younger jurists in the elite establishment breathed life into a new wave of (international) legalism. Many of these young figures, such as Ali Shayegan (1903-1981) and Karim Sanjabi (1905-1995), had completed part of their education at the Faculty of Law or its predecessor institutions. Relying on an anti-colonial legalist rhetoric to push for “resource sovereignty”, this wave of legalism culminated in the early-1950s oil nationalization policy led by Mossadegh’s government. This era of the ascendancy of liberal legalism in Iran arguably only came to an end following Mossadegh’s overthrow by a U.S.-backed coup d’état in August 1953.

1. Mohammad-Ali Foroughi, Hoquq-e asāsi yā ādāb-e mashrutiyat-e dowal [Constitutional Law or the Elements of Constitutional Governments] (Madrasa-ye ʿolum-e siāsi, 1907), 2. ↩︎
2. Hassan Moshir-al-Molk, Hoquq-e Beyn al-Melal [International Law] (Dār-al-tebā’e, 1901). ↩︎
3. Mohsen Nikbin, “On the Origins of the Earliest Lecture on International Law in Persia”, Jus Gentium – Journal of International Legal History, vol. V, issue 1 (2020): 179. ↩︎
4. Mohammad Mazaher (Sadiq Hazrat), Hoquq-e beyn-al-melal-e omumi [Public International Law] (1912). ↩︎
5. René Foignet, Manuel élémentaire de droit international public, à l’usage des étudiants en droit et des candidats aux carrières diplomatique et consulaire (6th ed., Librairie nouvelle de droit et de jurisprudence Arthur Rousseau, 1908). ↩︎
6. Hossein Motamen-ol-Molk, Majmu’e-ye mo’āhedāt-e dowlat-e ’alliye Irān bā doval-e khārejeh [Recueil des traités de l’Empire persan avec les pays étrangèrs] (Matba’e-ye Pharos, 1908). ↩︎
7. Mohammad Mossadegh, Kāpitulāsion va Irān [Capitulations and Iran] (Matba’e-ye Barādarān-e Bāqerzādeh, 1914). ↩︎
8. Ibid. 53. ↩︎
9. Ibid. 52. ↩︎