Ambassador Tomohiro Mikanagi is the Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Japan to the United Nations and was the Japanese Legal Advisor from 2022 to 2024. He also holds the title of Ambassador-at-Large for Cooperation on International Law.

He was a visiting fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre of International Law and is currently an LCIL Partner Fellow. He participated in the proceedings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for the Advisory Opinion issued on July 19, 2024. Japan's oral statement in February 2024 was unique as it focused exclusively on the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force.

Chair: Prof Sandesh Sivakumaran

Michael Byers (PhD Cantab) is Professor of Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. He also co-directs the Outer Space Institute, a global network of space experts united by their commitment to highly innovative, transdisciplinary research that addresses grand challenges facing the continued use and exploration of space. Dr. Byers has been a Junior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University; Professor of Law at Duke University; and a Visiting Professor at the universities of Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Nord (Norway), Novosibirsk (Russia), St Andrews, and the Geneva Graduate Institute. His two most recent books, both published by Cambridge University Press, are International Law and the Arctic and Who Owns Outer Space?

Chair: Prof Lorand Bartels, Centre Fellow

The Friday Lunchtime Lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press & Assessment.

An expert in international law and its subfields, including legal history and international criminal law, Diane Marie Amann has served as Regents’ Professor, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at the University of Georgia School of Law, and is an Academic Affiliate at University College London Faculty of Laws. She was Special Adviser to International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has held leadership posts in the American and European societies of international law. Amann is writing an Oxford University Press book about lawyers and other women professionals at the first Nuremberg trial.

Dr Natalie Klein is Associate Dean (Academic) and a Professor at UNSW Sydney’s Faculty of Law & Justice, Australia. Professor Klein teaches and researches in different areas of international law, focusing on law of the sea. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre in 2008 when she was working on Maritime Security and the Law of the Sea (OUP). She is co-author, with Kate Purcell and Jack McNally, of a forthcoming monograph, Submarines in International Law (CUP).

There is a sandwich lunch at 12.30 pm in the Old Library at the Centre. All lecture attendees welcome.

Chair: Prof Markus Gehring

The Friday Lunchtime Lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press & Assessment.

Lecture summary: Stories serve an integral role in society as, among other things, a meaning making tool. As a method of meaning making, stories are relational and allow the storyteller to assist their audience in understanding ideas, concepts, and experiences that lie beyond their lived experiences. Using this understanding and starting point, I ask what happens if we read international law as an iterative archive of stories about global society? I will start by exploring the meaning making function that storytelling serves in society, and then consider how international law, be it treaties, custom, case law or other legal instruments, can be read as official stories of the society that produced them.

Tamsin Phillipa Paige is an Associate Professor with Deakin Law School. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature, using qualitative sociological methods to analyse international law (with a focus on application of law and the impact it has on society). She also does law and literature research using popular fiction to understand social perceptions of the law. Her work has examined (among other things) Somali piracy, UN Security Council decision making, the impact of international law on queer lives, and conflict based sexual violence. In a former life, she was a French trained, fine dining pâtissière.

Chair: Dr Lena Holzer, Centre Fellow

This lecture was delivered on 20 February 2026 and is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series.

Lecture summary: In the last several decades, scholarly views of due diligence in international law have shifted from due diligence as a primary obligation under customary international law, to due diligence as a standard of conduct attached to a primary obligation. Thus, for example, due diligence is required to meet a State’s obligation of protection (of the environment) or of prevention (of genocide). The International Court of Justice in its Advisory Opinion on Climate Change adopted such an articulation and stated that due diligence is a standard of conduct and States have a duty to prevent significant harm to the environment by acting with due diligence. The Court not only reinforced the importance of the customary international law obligation not to cause significant harm to the environment but placed this within the ‘no harm’ principle, as expressed in the Corfu Channel case. However, the Court did not expressly articulate whether there was a broader obligation of due diligence that applies not only to the prevention of environmental harm, but also to the prevention of other harms to the rights and interests of States. Due diligence is thus as a crossroads. Has the ICJ essentially sought to bridge the gap between on the one hand the notion of due diligence as an obligation on a State not to permit activities subject to its jurisdiction or control which causes harm to the rights and interests of other States, and on the other hand the notion of due diligence as a standard of conduct attached to a primary obligation? Has the Court opened the door to finding a general customary international law obligation not to cause harm to the rights and interests of other States? Or has it confined due diligence to its status as a standard of conduct attached to a primary obligation? This lecture will discuss this pivotal point which is central to the elucidation of the foundation and scope of the due diligence obligation under international law.

Dr Penelope Ridings is a Member of the International Law Commission and New Zealand Barrister practising in the field of public international law. In 2025 she was appointed the ILC Special Rapporteur for the topic ‘Due Diligence in International Law’. She was formerly New Zealand’s Chief International Legal Adviser in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and a New Zealand diplomat. She was Agent for New Zealand before the International Court of Justice in Whaling in the Antarctic: Australia v Japan, New Zealand Intervening and before the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea in the Request for an Advisory Opinion submitted by the Sub-Regional Fisheries Commission.

After moving to the New Zealand Bar, she has advised governments and international organisations on public international law including law of the sea, fisheries, environmental law, trade and investment, international security and international dispute settlement. She was Chair of the 2025 arbitration under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (UK-Sandeel) and Chair of the WTO appeal arbitration China – Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights under the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement. She has served on several ICSID ad hoc Annulment Committees, including as Chair, and as an independent panellist in disputes before the WTO. She has lectured in international law and contributed to several books and written articles on various aspects of international law.

This lecture was delivered on 13 February 2026 and is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series.

Lecture summary: The lecture explores the systemic function of general principles in international law in light of the ongoing work of the ILC on general principles of law and recent practice of international courts and tribunals, such as the Climate Change Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice from 2025. In its first part, the lecture examines the ILC’s approach to the systemic function of general principles and comments of states on the ILC’s work. In its second and third part, the lecture discusses the two main features of the systemic function of general principles, namely their contribution to inter-norm and inter-systemic coherence in international law. All general principles potentially fulfil a systemic function by their gap-filling role and inter-systemic communication through Article 38(1)(c) ICJ Statute. Several general principles have a systemic pull in inter-norm contexts as interpretative guidelines and inter-norm harmonisers and coordinators. In the relationship between different (sub)orders of international law (including European law and national legal orders applying international law), several principles provide for ‘hinge’ mechanisms and inter-system harmonisers which open legal (sub)orders to one another, and integrate them into (relative) unity, while others serve as inter-system coordinators or mechanisms for conditional closure of legal orders. This means, all general principles have a systemic function, whereas certain principles have more direct systemic function by virtue of their normative content. Through their systemic function, general principles contribute as a central cohesive force furthering international law’s character as a legal and (relative) unitary system. This system is characterized by a complex and dynamic interplay between a plurality of legal norms, orders, and sub-orders, including national legal orders, through systemic principles of openness, coordination, and conditional closure.

Chair: Prof Campbell McLachlan

This lecture was given on 6 February 2026 and is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series at the Lauterpacht Centre.

Lauri Mälksoo is Professor of International Law at the University of Tartu in Estonia. He is member of the Institut de Droit International, of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe and of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. He has published two monographs on the history and theory of international law in Russia and the Soviet Union at the Oxford University Press.

Chair: Prof Marc Weller

This lecture was given on 30 January 2026 and is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series at the Lauterpacht Centre.

No lecture summary available.

Chair: Prof Jan Klabbers

This lecture was given on 23 January 2026 and is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series at the Lauterpacht Centre.

Lecture summary: Is international law facing a decline of treaties?

In recent years, several authoritative voices have pointed out certain developments which seem to indicate that States are shifting away from treaty law-making for the governance of their international relations.

Taking as a starting point the sociological concept of “liquid modernity” introduced by Zygmunt Bauman, this lecture will explore how treaties, archetypes of solid and stable law-making, have reacted to an unstable global community where norms seem to be eroding and long-term commitments appear to be challenged.

As the lecture will show, there is no doubt that the law and practice of treaties have evolved to adapt to a shifting international environment, but the news about the death of treaties is greatly exaggerated. 

The Eli Lauterpacht Lecture was established after Sir Eli's death in 2017 to celebrate his life and work. This lecture takes place on a Friday at the Centre at the start of the Michaelmas Term in any academic year.

These lectures are kindly supported by Dr and Mrs Ivan Berkowitz who are Principal Benefactors of the Centre.

Kristina Daugirdas is the Francis A. Allen Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. She teaches and writes primarily in the fields of international law and institutions.

Her scholarship currently focuses on international organizations, accountability mechanisms, and the ongoing evolution of the international legal system. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Organizations Law Review and the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law. She also serves as an adviser to the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law.

In 2016–2017, Daugirdas was a visiting fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and served as a consultant on public international law issues for the World Intellectual Property Organization. From 2014 to 2017, she co-authored the Contemporary Practice of the United States Relating to International Law: A section of the American Journal of International Law. In 2014, she was awarded the Francis Deák Prize for an outstanding article published in the American Journal of International Law by a younger author.

Daugirdas has taken on significant leadership roles at the law school, including serving as Associate Dean for Academic Programming from 2021 to 2024. She also led a subcommittee of the Advisory Committee on the University of Michigan Principles on Diversity of Thought and Freedom of Expression.

Prior to entering academia, Daugirdas was an attorney-adviser at the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser, receiving multiple honors for her service. As an attorney-adviser, she provided guidance on the negotiation and implementation of UN Security Council sanctions and amicus participation by the US government in lawsuits with foreign policy implications.

Chair: Prof Fernando Lusa Bordin

This lecture was given on 7 November 2025 and is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series at the Lauterpacht Centre.

Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge (Emmanuel College). She is the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge UP, 2011) and Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge UP, 2022), and the editor of Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge UP, 2017). Before the We has won six awards, including the SSHA and ISA annual best book prizes. In 2024, she was elected to fellowship in the British Academy and the Academia Europea. Also in 2024, she received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Copenhagen. At the moment, Zarakol is overseeing an international research collaboration on Global Disorder funded by a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers Grant. She is also one of the two Associate Editors of International Organization. Her next book, Ozymandias, is a world history of strongmen, aimed at a general audience. This book is under contract with William Collins (UK) and Grove Atlantic (US). 

Chair: Prof Surabhi Ranganathan

This lecture was given on 31 October 2025 and is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series at the Lauterpacht Centre.

The Hatton Chair is the first endowed professorship in climate law in the United Kingdom. The aim of the Chair is to advance research and teaching with a view to strengthening legal responses to the ongoing climate crisis.

The lecture was followed by a panel on 'The Prospects of Global Climate Law'

Co-organised by the University of Cambridge and LUISS.

Jan Klabbers was educated in international law and political science at the University of Amsterdam, where he also defended his doctoral thesis. In 1996 he was appointed professor of international law at the University of Helsinki, a position he recently left to take up the Whewell Chair in Cambridge. His research focuses mostly on the law of treaties and the law of international organizations – today’s talk taps into his current, ERC-sponsored PRIVIGO project.

Chair: Prof Surabhi Ranganathan, Centre Deputy Director

This lecture was given on 10 October 2025 and part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series at the Lauterpacht Centre.

We will come together to celebrate the life and scholarship of our colleague and friend, Professor Karen Knop (1960-2022). Karen, until her untimely passing, was the Cecil A Wright Chair at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. A long-time friend of the Lauterpacht Centre, Karen was to have delivered the Centre’s 2025 Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures.

The 2025 Lectures will take place on 13 and 14 March, over four special sessions, conversing with Karen’s extraordinary body of work across the history and theory of international law, gender and feminism studies, and private and foreign relations law. Four former HLM Lecturers will deliver these lectures in conversation with three discussants, all outstanding scholars mentored by Karen.

Session IV Discussion and Q&A led by Professor Susan Marks

Chair: Professor Antony Anghie

Professor Marks will lead the discussion of the three talks, teasing out cross-cutting themes and the enduring influence of Karen Knop’s scholarship across different fields of international law scholarship.

Susan Marks is Professor of International Law at the LSE.

We will come together to celebrate the life and scholarship of our colleague and friend, Professor Karen Knop (1960-2022). Karen, until her untimely passing, was the Cecil A Wright Chair at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. A long-time friend of the Lauterpacht Centre, Karen was to have delivered the Centre’s 2025 Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures.

Session III Private and Foreign Relations Law

Professor Anne Peters in conversation with Dr Roxana Banu

Chair: Professor Campbell McLachlan

Professor Peters’s talk, 'Populism, Foreign Relations Law, and global order and justice', will discuss populist foreign relations law, which was Karen Knop’s last project, at the university of Helsinki and as a Max Planck fellow. This talk will make the point that ongoing transformations of the concept of law itself, of legal procedures, and of legal substance cut across the ‘levels’ of governance. And neither identitarian rhetoric, nor trade wars, nor border-fences will bring back an inter-state, Westphalian (or ‘Eastfalian’) order. We are living in conditions of global law (and transnational) law. Populist heads of state both deploy and defy this law (concluding populist treaties or deals such as the German-Turkish refugee agreements; denouncing treaties such as ICSID or the Paris Agreement; using their war powers to escape domestic critique; raising tariffs to please their voter-base, and so on). At the same time, domestic, local and transnational actors (ranging from cities to courts to Indigenous peoples, or philanthro-capitalists) activate all kinds of law to resist populism. Such global lawfare destabilises world order but also has a transformative potential. New legal forms (especially informal agreements), new legal processes (such as public interest litigation before the ICJ) and new legal principles (such as One Health; Rectification/reparation; and the exposure of double standards) are responding to the big challenges for global order and justice: the cultural, the social, and the ecological challenge.

Dr Banu’s talk, 'Foreign Affairs, Self-Determination and Private International Law', begins with the point that foreign affairs questions are often thought to lie at the very edge of private international law, perhaps in the leftover corners of the historical alignment between private and public international law. Similarly, in part on the assumption that private international law settles conflicts of laws between already established states, there wouldn’t appear to be any intuitive connection between nationalist or self-determination movements and the field of private international law.

This talk will show that these assumptions are mistaken. By engaging with the historical development of the field from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the talk will show that private international law has been deeply enmeshed in major geopolitical events generally, and in nationalist and self-determination movements, in particular. This enmeshment is neither accidental, nor exclusively modern. It is the inevitable result of some of private international law’s main analytical and conceptual building blocks.

Anne Peters is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law Heidelberg (Germany), and Professor at the universities of Heidelberg, Freie Universität Berlin and Basel (Switzerland).

Roxana Banu is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at the Faculty of Law and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford.

We will come together to celebrate the life and scholarship of our colleague and friend, Professor Karen Knop (1960-2022). Karen, until her untimely passing, was the Cecil A Wright Chair at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. A long-time friend of the Lauterpacht Centre, Karen was to have delivered the Centre’s 2025 Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures.

Session II Gender and Feminism

Professor Christine Chinkin in conversation with Dr Mai Taha

Chair: Professor Sandesh Sivakumaran

Professor Chinkin’s talk, 'Self-determination for women through three encounters' will explore three encounters with Karen's Knop's work that illustrate how self-determination remains illusory in many instances for women and their responses that challenge the structures of international law: discriminatory laws with respect to the nationality of married women; the Tokyo Women's Tribunal; and the Greenham Common women's peace camp.

Dr Taha’s talk, ‘Ways of Seeing: On the Gendering Work of Law and Violence’ will provide comments and reflections in engagement with Professor Chinkin’s talk, and Professor Knop’s writings.

Christine Chinkin, FBA, CMG is Emerita Professor of International Law at the LSE, Visiting Professorial Research Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security and Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan.

Mai Taha is Assistant Professor of Human Rights in the Department of Sociology at the LSE.

We will come together to celebrate the life and scholarship of our colleague and friend, Professor Karen Knop (1960-2022). Karen, until her untimely passing, was the Cecil A Wright Chair at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. A long-time friend of the Lauterpacht Centre, Karen was to have delivered the Centre’s 2025 Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures.

Session I - History and Theory

Professor Martti Koskenniemi in conversation with Dr Megan Donaldson

Chair: Professor Surabhi Ranganathan

Professor Koskenniemi’ s talk, 'Narrating International Society: Management of Pluralism according to Marcel Gauchet & Karen Knop’, will first address the emergence of the theme of a “law of an international society” in the 19th century, its use in the 20th century to support a managerial view of international institutions. It will then focus on the challenges that cultural and ideological pluralism poses to received ideas about the role of law in the government of domestic and international society.

Dr Donaldson’s talk, ‘Gaze, Agency and International Society’, reads Karen Knop’s early work on self-determination as a repertoire of techniques for thinking collectivities and affiliations against and across states. The multiple and mobile perspectives she brought to bear, and the agency she glimpsed in disparate individuals and communities, pervaded much of her later work too, and remains open to, even generative of, renewed understandings of international society.

Martti Koskenniemi is Professor Emeritus of International law at the University of Helsinki.

Megan Donaldson is Associate Professor of International Law at University College London.

Tanja Aalberts is Professor of Law and Politics at the department of Transnational Legal Studies, VU Amsterdam. She is the author of 'Constructing Sovereignty between Politics and Law' (Routledge, 2012), co-author of 'The Changing Practices of International Law' (CUP, 2018) and co-edited 'The Power of Legality. Practices of International Law and their Politics' (CUP, 2016). Her work on the interplay between politics and law within global governance, misrecognition, colonial treaties and interdisciplinarity has been published in various journals and handbooks in International Law and International Relations. She was a founding board member of the European International Studies Association, and editor of the Leiden Journal of International Law. She currently is series editor for Voices in IR with Oxford University Press and member of the Advisory Council International Affairs for the Dutch government. Her current research focuses on transnational legal encounters and the aesthetics of international law. She is also doing archival research and writing a book on the Peace Palace as the first building of the international community.

https://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/press/events/2025/05/friday-lecture-rubber-boats-transnational-legal-encounters-mediterranean-prof-tanja-aalberts-vu

Hussein Haeri KC is a Partner at Withers in London and Head of the firm's Public International Law Group. He is a King's Counsel and was the only Solicitor Advocate to take Silk in 2024. Hussein has extensive experience as counsel and advocate on international dispute resolution matters for almost 20 years in London, Paris and New York, including before the ICJ, ITLOS, under ICSID and UNCITRAL arbitration rules and in national courts. He has been recognised for many years by the major legal directories including Chambers & Partners, which refers to him as an "outstanding lawyer", and Legal 500 which states that "he combines huge intellectual powers with great client handling".

He is a Partner Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, a Senior Fellow at SOAS in London and has lectured at various other universities including the University of Oxford, Sciences Po in Paris and Roma Tre University in Rome.

Sharath Srinivasan is David and Elaine Potter Professor of International Politics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He is also Founding Director, and currently Co-Director, of the University of Cambridge's Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR). Professor Srinivasan is a Fellow and Trustee of the Rift Valley Institute and a Trustee and Vice-President of the British Institute in Eastern Africa.

Professor Srinivasan’s work focuses on contentious politics in Africa in global perspective, from explaining failed peace interventions in civil wars to rethinking democratic politics in a digital age. He is the author of When Peace Kills Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan: The Comprehensive Peace Agreement and Beyond (British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2020).

Chair: Dr Juliana Santos de Carvalho, Centre Fellow

Richard Barnes is Professor of International Law at the University of Lincoln and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea, the University of Tromsø. His current research focuses on the human right to property, ocean commons, and the BBNJ Agreement. He is widely published in the fields of international law and law of the sea. Property Rights and Natural Resources (2009), won the SLS Birks Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. He has edited several collections of essays including Research Handbook on Plastics Regulation (2024), Frontiers in International Environmental Law. Oceans and Climate (2021), Research Handbook on Climate Change, Oceans and Coasts (2020), and The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea: A Living Instrument (2016). Professor Barnes a member of the ILA Committee on the Protection of People at Sea. He has acted as a consultant for the WWF, Oceana, ClientEarth, the European Parliament, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. He has also provided advice to foreign ministries. He has appeared numerous times before Parliamentary select committees on matters related to law of the sea, fisheries and Brexit. He is on the Editorial Board of International and Comparative Law Quarterly, the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law, the New Zealand Yearbook of International Law, the German Yearbook of International Law, and the Portuguese Yearbook of the Law of the Sea. 

Feminist activists, country representatives, and other civil society actors have debated how to define “gender” in international criminal law (ICL) for at least three decades. In the Rome Conference that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its Statute in 1998, defining “gender” was a hotly debated topic of negotiation. More recently, this debate has resurfaced in the steps leading to the International Law Commission’s Draft Articles for a Crimes Against Humanity Treaty, and continues to be discussed in the deliberations at the Sixth Committee on the Draft Articles. The CAH Convention is now expected to be negotiated between 2026-2029, and, more than a mere point of contention, the concept of ‘gender’ in its text can be crucial for prosecuting sexual and gender-based international crimes and thus fundamental to gender justice efforts worldwide. With this in mind, this roundtable gathers scholars and activists studying and working (often simultaneously) on the definition of gender in international criminal law, in an effort to learn from their specific positionalities, perceptions, and experiences about the challenges, strategies, and possibilities for (non-)defining the term.

https://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/press/events/2025/02/panel-queering-gender-crimes-against-humanity-draft-possibilities-alliances-and-strategies

This lecture, based on Dr Karina Patrício Ferreira Lima’s forthcoming book Governing Sovereign Debt Crises: The Case for International Sovereign Insolvency Law (Hart Publishing), makes the case for creating such a mechanism under international law. The book challenges prevailing narratives that attribute sovereign debt crises solely to debtor states’ mismanagement or misfortunes, instead arguing that sovereign insolvency is a systemic feature of the international monetary system. Current solutions—voluntary, ad hoc, and fragmented—fail to equitably allocate losses across an increasingly diversified sovereign creditor base, leaving many creditors worse off. At the same time, debtor states and their populations remain vulnerable to macroeconomic crises and enduring austerity, which often lead to long-term economic stagnation.

The book adopts a legal political economy approach to illustrate how power asymmetries among stakeholders and the absence of enforceable rules perpetuate inefficiencies and inequities in resolving sovereign debt crises. Drawing on the legal theory of finance, insolvency law, and common resource governance theory, it illustrates how these governance failures result in a dual tragedy: a tragedy of the commons and a tragedy of the anticommons. The lecture will also examine the growing complexity of sovereign debt markets, including the diversification of creditor types, the erosion of ‘gentlemen’s agreements,’ and the limitations of initiatives like the Paris Club and the G20’s Common Framework for debt treatments. It concludes by arguing that only international sovereign insolvency rules can resolve the delays, inefficiencies, and inequities that plague sovereign debt restructuring, while exploring avenues for implementing such a proceeding and discussing the role of domestic law in a well-functioning international sovereign debt architecture.

Dr Karina Patrício Ferreira Lima is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the intersection of law, finance, and sovereign debt within the broader context of global economic governance. Her research portfolio covers the legal governance of sovereign debt crises, the law and policy of international financial institutions, and the macroeconomic impact of financial law and regulation.

Dr Patrício advises public entities, NGOs, and leading law firms on various aspects of financial and monetary law, including sovereign debt restructuring, financial regulation, and the governance of international financial institutions. Her work has been recognised with prestigious awards, including the 2022 Society of International Economic Law-Hart Prize and the 2022 John H. Jackson Prize, conferred by the Journal of International Economic Law. She also serves as a peer reviewer for top law and social sciences journals globally.

Date: Friday Lunchtime Lecture: Friday 31 January 2025

Dr Arman Sarvarian will speak about his forthcoming monograph The Law of State Succession: Principles and Practice to be published by Oxford University Press in April. The product of seven years’ labour of approximately 170,000 words, the work includes a foreword by Professor August Reinisch of the University of Vienna and International Law Commission. The following is the summary of Oxford University Press:

'The Law of State Succession: Principles and Practice provides a comprehensive, practical, and empirical overview of the topic, establishing State succession as a distinct field with a cohesive set of rules.

From the secession of the United States of America in 1784 to that of South Sudan in 2011, the book digests and analyses State practice spanning more than two centuries. It is based on research into a wide and diverse range of case studies, including archival and previously unpublished data. Reconstructing the intellectual foundation of the field, the book offers a vision for its progressive development - one that is rooted in an interpretation of State practice that transcends the politics of the codification projects in the decolonization and desovietization eras.

The book examines international law on State succession with respect to territorial rights and obligations, State property (including archives) and debt, treaties, international claims and responsibility, as well as nationality and private property (including concessions and investments). Its central focus is identifying the general rules of international law in order to guide States in the negotiation of succession agreements, the interpretation of ambiguous or incomplete provisions, and the regulation of succession in default of specific agreement.

A highly relevant work, The Law of State Succession offers governments, judges, legal practitioners, and scholars an authoritative account of the current law. It enables negotiators to identify different legal paths within succession and assists adjudicators in interpreting provisions of succession agreements and regulating questions omitted from such agreements.' The book is available for pre-order at the OUP website.

Dr Arman Sarvarian a public international lawyer in academia and private practice. A Reader in Public International Law at the University of Surrey, he regularly acts as legal adviser and counsel to States, companies and individuals. He is counsel to the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire in the pending Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change advisory proceedings of the International Court of Justice and counsel in two pending investor-State arbitrations. Since 2019, he has served as legal adviser to the Republic of Armenia at the Legal Committee of the UN General Assembly for the annual reports of the International Law Commission and International Court of Justice as well as multilateral negotiations on reform of investor-State arbitration in Working Group III of the UN Commission on International Trade Law. He served as judge ad hoc in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in 2020.

A generalist of broad interests and expertise, his first monograph Professional Ethics at the International Bar (Oxford University Press, International Courts and Tribunals Series, 19 September 2013) was the first comprehensive work on the subject and has been widely cited, including in proceedings before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, investment arbitrations and the International Court of Justice. His second monograph The Law of State Succession: Principles and Practice will be published by Oxford University Press in April 2025. He is a Humboldt Research Fellow in Climate Change Law at the University of Kiel from 2024 to 2026.

Chair: Dr Jamie Trinidad, Centre Fellow

Date: Friday Lunchtime Lecture - Friday 24 January 2025

Summary: Does international law place any constraints on a possible Ukraine-Russia peace agreement? While we can only speculate about its contents, two aspects appear certain: Ukraine will be asked to relinquish (at a minimum) territory now occupied by Russia, and it will only contemplate entering into an agreement because Russia invaded its territory. Professor Fox will examine the implications of these and other factors for the validity of an agreement.

Gregory H. Fox is a Professor of Law at Wayne State University School of Law, where he is the Director of the Program for International Legal Studies. Professor Fox is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Law School and the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, a Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Research Centre for International Law at Cambridge University, a Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Public International Law and Comparative Public Law in Heidelberg, Germany, and a Fellow at the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School, among other institutions.

Professor Fox has written widely on a variety of international law topics, including civil war peace agreements, the powers of the UN Security Council, international occupation law, international control of territory, and international efforts to promote democratic governance. His most recent article, Of Looting, Land and Loss: The New International Law of Takings, was published in Volume 65 of the Harvard International Law Journal.

Professor Fox was co-counsel to the State of Eritrea in the Zukar-Hanish arbitration with the Republic of Yemen concerning the status of a group of islands in the southern Red Sea. He has also served as counsel in several human rights cases in US courts.

Professor Fox was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation/Social Science Research Council Fellowship in International Peace and Security. He began his career in the Litigation Department of the firm Hale & Dorr, now WilmerHale. He is a graduate of Bates College and New York University Law School.

Umut Özsu is Professor of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. His research interests lie mainly in public international law, the history and theory of international law, and Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state. He is the author of Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (OUP, 2015) and Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82 (CUP, 2023). He is also co-editor of the Research Handbook on Law and Marxism (Elgar, 2021) and The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, 2019), as well as several journal symposia.

The lecture will illustrate that despite the laudable objectives of creating a new system of international law that attempts to redress previous inequalities in accessing vaccines and countermeasures, they are unlikely to meet these broader objectives. The lecture will argue that this is because, despite being a public good, Global Health Law has always been underpinned by capitalist and post-colonial rationales which privilege trade. In order to make lasting changes, the current system of Global Health Law must focus on broader questions of ‘reparations’ that will achieve greater equity.

Sharifah is a Professor of Global Health Law at the University of Warwick and the Director of the Warwick Global Health Centre. She is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work is at the intersection of international law, public policy and global health. Professor Sekalala is particularly focused on the role of human rights frameworks in addressing global health inequalities. Her research has focused on health crises in Sub-Saharan Africa, international financing institutions and the rise of non-communicable diseases and she has published in leading legal, international relations and public health journals.

Prof Sekalala is currently the PI on a Wellcome-Trust-funded project on digital health apps in Sub-Saharan Africa. Professor Sekalala is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FaSS) and she has consulted on human rights and health in many developing countries and worked for international organisations such as UNAIDS, the WHO and the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Her research has also been funded by the Wellcome Trust, GCRF, ESRC, Open Society Foundation and international organisations including the International Labour Organisation and the WHO. Sharifah also sits on the Strategic Advisory Network of the ESRC.

Sharifah holds a PhD in Law (Warwick, 2012), an LLM in Public International Law (Distinction in research, Nottingham, 2006) and an LLB Honours (Makerere University, Uganda 2004). She was called to the Ugandan Bar in 2005.

Professor Antje Wiener FAcSS, MAE, holds the Chair of Political Science, especially Global Governance at the University of Hamburg where she is a member of the Faculty of Business and Social Sciences as well as the Law Faculty. She is an elected By-Fellow of Hughes Hall University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences, and a Member of the Academia Europea. Her research and teaching centres on International Relations theory, especially norms research and contestation theory. Previously she held Chairs in International Studies at Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Bath and taught at the Universities of Stanford, Carleton, Sussex and Hannover. Current research projects include ‘Contested Climate Justice in Sensitive Regions’ at the Cluster of Excellence Climate, Climatic Change and Society (CLICCS) as well as ‘Doing Theory – From Where and What For? A Backpackers’ Guide to Knowledge Production’ at the Centre for Sustainable Society Research (CSS) among others. With James Tully, she is co-founding editor of Global Constitutionalism (CUP, since 2012 ). And she also edits the Norm Research in International Relations Series (Springer). She serves on several Committees of the Academy of Social Sciences . In 2021, she concluded her second three-year term as elected member of the Executive Committee of the German Political Science Association (DVPW). Her book ‘Contestation and Constitution of Norms in Global International Relations’ (CUP 2018) was awarded the International Law Section’s Book Prize in 2020. And her most recent book ‘Contesting the World: Norm Research in Theory and Practice’ co-edited with Phil Orchard was published with CUP in 2024.

Grand corruption does not thrive and endure in many countries because of a lack of laws. 186 UN member states are parties to the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC). Virtually all of them have the laws required by the UNCAC criminalizing corrupt conduct, and international obligations to enforce them against their corrupt leaders. However, kleptocrats have impunity in the countries they rule because they control the police, the prosecutors, and the courts.

Therefore, the proposed International Anti-Corruption Court (IACC) is urgently needed. It will be a court of last resort, to prosecute kleptocrats and their private conspirators, for violating treaty counterparts of the laws of countries that are unwilling or unable to do so themselves. Successful prosecutions, and civil suits, in the IACC will result in the recovery and repatriation of stolen assets. The imprisonment of kleptocrats, who are among the worst abusers of human rights, will create opportunities for the democratic process to replace them with leaders dedicated to serving their citizens rather than enriching themselves. It will also deter others tempted to emulate their example.

The effort to establish the IACC is rapidly progressing. It has been publicly endorsed by: more than 350 world leaders, including 55 former Presidents and Prime Ministers; the European Parliament; the Netherlands, Canada, Ecuador, Nigeria, Moldova, and the UK Labour Party before it recently took office. Many other countries have privately expressed support for the IACC or strong interest in seriously considering the treaty being drafted to establish it that will be ready to be reviewed in early 2025.

Speaker: Mark L. Wolf is a Senior United States District Judge and Chair of the Integrity Initiatives International (III), which has catalyzed and is coordinating the campaign to create the IACC. Prior to his appointment in 1985, Judge Wolf served as a Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the US after Watergate and as the chief federal corruption prosecutor in Massachusetts. He has taught a course on combatting corruption internationally at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He has spoken on the role of a judge in a democracy, human rights issues, and combatting corruption in many countries, including Russia, China, Ukraine, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Hungary, Egypt, Cyprus, Panama, Colombia, Mexico, Norway, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and at the Vatican.

The lecture will chart the establishment and work of the Coalition, through the perspective of its independent panel of legal experts, the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom, and the Panel’s work advising States and international organisations across a broad panoply of media freedom issues, and answering requests by international courts and tribunals to intervene in cases of public importance engaging Article 19 of the ICCPR and UDHR. It will focus on examples of areas where specific recommendations by legal experts have already been turned into State policy and practice (for instance, with the creation and implementation of an emergency visa for journalists at risk), and areas where the progress towards implementation has been altogether more challenging.

Five years on from its establishment, the Media Freedom Coalition finds itself at a crossroads, while its tri-partite structure of States, legal experts, and civil society is already being replicated by States in other areas of international legal cooperation and compliance.

Speaker Biography: Can Yeğinsu is a barrister practising from 3 Verulam Buildings in London where he practises in commercial litigation, international commercial and investment arbitration, public law and human rights, and public international law.

Prof Yeğinsu is also a long-standing member of the Law Faculties of Georgetown Law, Columbia Law, and Koç University Law School where he teaches courses on public international law, including courses on international dispute settlement, international human rights, and international investment law. He is a Senior Fellow at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, and serves on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law.

In 2022, Prof Yeğinsu was appointed by the Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, with Catherine Amirfar, to succeed Amal Clooney as the Deputy Chair of the High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom, having served as a member of the Panel since its established in 2019.

This year, Oxford University Press published the second edition of The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law, co-authored by Prof Daniel Bodansky and LCIL Centre Fellow, Prof Harro van Asselt. Aside from the co-authorship, this second edition differs in several important aspects from the previous edition, in order to adequately reflect the important developments that international environmental law has witnessed during the last decade.

At this event, Professors Bodansky and van Asselt will provide an overview of the approach to international environmental law taken in this second edition, highlighting the ways in which it differs from the first. This presentation is intended to subsequently lead to a discussion on developments specifically in the international climate change regime, including prospects for the Paris Agreement and the recent request for an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on climate change.

Through this case study, the lecture aims to expand our understanding of the impact of international organizations championed by actors in the Global South in this period, the reactions they provoked from others, and the potential and limits of international legal reform through such institutional means. As a technology for representing, knowing, and managing inter-organizational relations, the study of inter-agency meetings offers insights into both micro- and macro-level processes in international law, and the links between them. To this end, the lecture develops a concept of ‘staging’ to analyze the work of assembling and choreographing heterogeneous elements with the aim of producing a particular performance of international legal ordering. As a multilayered concept, ‘staging’ invokes and enables the study of international law’s material, spatial, and temporal dimensions. The lecture shows that, as much as staging international law implies scripting, direction, and rehearsal, it also inevitably entails improvisation, accident, and error.

Guy Fiti Sinclair is an Associate Professor and the Associate Dean (Pacific) at Auckland Law School, The University of Auckland. He holds first degrees in law and history, and a Doctor of Juridical Science (JSD) from New York University School of Law. His research and teaching focusses on the doctrine, theory, and practice of international law, often in historical perspective and with particular focuses on international organisations law, international economic law, and law and global governance. His first book, To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), was awarded the European Society of International Law Book Prize in 2018. Guy’s current research includes a project on institutional interactions in the construction and contestation of international economic law, funded by a Marsden Fast Start Grant from Te Apārangi | Royal Society of New Zealand. In 2023, he began work on a major research project on international legal ordering in Oceania/the Pacific, supported by a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand.

In this lecture, based on a forthcoming co-authored article, Professor Oona Hathaway will examine the law on “mistakes” in war. She will consider whether and when the law holds individuals and states responsible for “mistakes.” To see how the law works, or fails to work, in practice, she will examine the US military’s own assessments of civilian casualties. She will show that “mistakes” are far more common than generally acknowledged. Some errors are, moreover, the predictable - and avoidable - result of a system that does too little to learn from its mistakes. She will focus her remarks on the United States, both because of its global military operations and because of the power of its example to shape global practices. The United States is far from alone, however. Thus, lessons learned from its failures can be instructive for other states as well.

Relevant papers:

S Thambisetty ‘The Unfree Commons: Freedom of Marine Scientific Research and the Status of Genetic Resources Beyond National Jurisdiction (Dec 4, 2023) LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No. 24/2023 87 Modern Law Review (2024) Forthcoming

S Thambisetty, P Oldham, C Chiarolla, The Expert Briefing Document: A Developing Country Perspective on the Making of The BBNJ Treaty (September 21, 2023). LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No. 30/2023, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4580046 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4580046

P Oldham, Paul C Chiarolla, S Thambisetty, Digital Sequence Information in the UN High Seas Treaty: Insights from the Global Biodiversity Framework-related Decisions (January 30, 2023). LSE Law - Policy Briefing Paper No. 53, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4343130 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4343130

Analysing international law’s approach to natural resources also directs our attention to changing ideas of nature and to the heart of international law's anthropocentrism, questioning its efficacy in tackling the ecological crisis. What we see here is an extractivist rationality that is intrinsically linked to the commodification of natural resources and green economy approaches in international environmental law. Last not least, a natural resource perspective highlights the fact that the legal concepts devised to determine how we share the world’s resources entail distributive processes among humans themselves.

Sigrid Boysen is Professor of International Law at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg and a Judge at the Hamburg State Constitutional Court. She serves as editor-in-chief of the international law review ‘Archiv des Völkerrechts’, has held positions as Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University (2014), the Institute for Global Law & Policy at Harvard Law School (2021/22) and is currently Fernand Braudel Fellow at the Law Department of the European University Institute in Florence. Her research focuses on international law with a particular focus on the theory of international law, the law of natural resources, environmental justice, international environmental and economic law, and constitutional law. Recent publications include Die postkoloniale Konstellation. Natürliche Ressourcen und das Völkerrecht der Moderne, Mohr Siebeck 2021; ‘Postcolonial Global Constitutionalism’, in: Lang and Wiener (eds.), Handbook on Global Constitutionalism, 2nd ed. 2023, 166-184.

Summary: The Golden Age of globalization has reached an end in the popular and political imagination. In its place has arisen growing anxiety about state borders. What is the evidence of such a shift? What are the causes and consequences? What answers does international law have for how international borders should be governed, especially as human mobility intensifies? Traditional international law defining and settling borders will not suffice to answer these questions. Instead, the lectures explore a different approach that views international borders as institutions that obligate states to manage the tensions that territorial governance implies in an interdependent world.

6 pm Thursday 14 March 2024

Lecture 3: Where Cooperative Border Governance (Should) Lead: Interstate Borders as Though People Mattered

The lecture culminates by addressing ways forward in the light of Lectures 1 and 2. First, it explores the ways that border unilateralism has had some results that are inconsistent with international human rights. Second, it suggests possibilities for addressing rights violations committed in the name of “border sovereignty.” While international law is not equipped to address all of the injustices and anxieties associated with international borders, it does offer cooperative levers and lenses that can help address and arrest some of its worst consequences.

Chair: Eyal Benvenisti

Summary: The Golden Age of globalization has reached an end in the popular and political imagination. In its place has arisen growing anxiety about state borders. What is the evidence of such a shift? What are the causes and consequences? What answers does international law have for how international borders should be governed, especially as human mobility intensifies? Traditional international law defining and settling borders will not suffice to answer these questions. Instead, the lectures explore a different approach that views international borders as institutions that obligate states to manage the tensions that territorial governance implies in an interdependent world.

6 pm Wednesday 13 March 2024

Lecture 2: Treaties and Neighbors: Recovering the Cooperative Roots of International Bordering

Territorializing political authority was a violent affair. Borders are implicated in that violence. But this lecture foregrounds their cooperative international legal roots as well. In theory, borders divide by agreement. That is their purpose. Any border worth its salt impacts relationships between states, communities and individuals. The obligation, then, is to address that impact. This lecture explores international legal resources for cooperative border management, which is subject, as always, to international legal obligations.

Chair: Surabhi Ranganathan

Summary: The Golden Age of globalization has reached an end in the popular and political imagination. In its place has arisen growing anxiety about state borders. What is the evidence of such a shift? What are the causes and consequences? What answers does international law have for how international borders should be governed, especially as human mobility intensifies? Traditional international law defining and settling borders will not suffice to answer these questions. Instead, the lectures explore a different approach that views international borders as institutions that obligate states to manage the tensions that territorial governance implies in an interdependent world.

6 pm Tuesday 12 March 2024

Lecture I: Setting the stage: Border Anxiety in an Interdependent World

Even as interstate territorial aggrandizement has waned over the decades, border anxiety around the world is on the rise. A rich array of physical and rhetorical evidence from satellite imagery to discourse analysis supports this point. International borders have become a flashpoint for political demands and policies that insist on unilateralism. Yet “sovereign borders” misconstrue the very purposes – and consequences – of bordering. Can an International Law of borders move from its traditional focus on border fixity to border management? That will be the focus of Lecture 2.

Chair: Sandesh Sivakumaran

By contrast, international financial law, which was of limited importance during the Bretton Woods era, has become a major soft law force in the global financial sector since the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision was created in 1974. The dichotomy between profit maximization and systemic risk at the core of global finance today is overseen and guided by the technocrats of the Basel Committee, the Financial Stability Board and other institutions of international financial law.

Today, the pendulums of international monetary and financial law may be reversing again. Armed conflict, rising authoritarianism, growing fragmentation of the global financial system, and a revival of capital controls and other restrictions on capital flows could reinvigorate international monetary law and the IMF. This institution has reimagined itself multiple times already while staying true to its original mandate of safeguarding monetary stability.

Michael Waibel is a professor of international law at the University of Vienna. His teaching and writing focus on international law, international economic law, sovereign debt and international dispute settlement. He received the Deák Prize of the American Society of International Law, the Book Prize of the European Society of International Law and a Leverhulme Prize for his research. He is Co-General Editor of the ICSID Reports (with Jorge Viñuales) and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Economic Law (with Kathleen Claussen and Sergio Puig).

Vasuki Nesiah teaches human rights, legal and social theory at NYU Gallatin where she is also faculty director of the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights. She has published on the history and politics of human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal law, reparations, global feminisims, and decolonization. Nesiah was awarded the Jacob Javits Professorship (2022), Gallatin Distinguished Teacher Award in 2021 and the NYU Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award in 2020. Her current book projects include International Conflict Feminism (forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press) and Reading the Ruins: Colonialism, Slavery, and International Law. A founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), she is also co-editing TWAIL: A Handbook with Anthony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Michael Fakhri, and Karin Mickelson (forthcoming from Elgar).

Current concerns focus on the power of private digital platforms and the networked communicative infrastructure they maintain for the global economy. Introducing an historical perspective to such debates highlights infrastructure’s ongoing connections to violence and exploitation. This points to the wider and constitutive role of infrastructure in international life and underscores the need to address the blending of public and private forms of power in global governance.

While the technologies driving change and re-appraisal within the contemporary international legal imagination are clearly distinct, viewing infrastructure as regulation in the current day requires us to confront continuing patterns of inequality and discrimination, which in turn can be connected with a longer international legal history. Such a focus can also help to explain how the traditional form of international law as a limited system of positive rules and of managerial ordering came to dominate the legal imagination and entrench a state-centrism which now appears anachronistic in light of the reality of private power and its concentration on the international plane.

Dr Daniel Joyce is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney. He specialises in international law, media law and human rights. Daniel is an Affiliated Research Fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute at the University of Helsinki, an Associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute and a member of the Allens Hub for Technology, Law & Innovation. His monograph Informed Publics, Media and International Law was published by Hart in 2020. He is a visiting fellow at LSE Law School from September 2023 until March 2024.

Dr Lucas Lixinski is Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney. His research interests main centre on international human rights adjudication and international cultural heritage law, and sometimes international legal history especially in relation to rights. His latest monograph is Legalized Identities: Cultural Heritage Law and the Shaping of Transitional Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which he started developing while a visitor at the Lauterpacht Centre in 2018.

The issue of jurisdiction to fight this type of maritime crimes may be complex, especially when the flag State does not respect its duties under the International Law of the Sea. Practice has shown that difficulties in acting can be particularly stormy when dealing with the fight against the maritime crime of illicit traffic in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances by sea.

In these terms, the starting point for a contemporary analysis of the issue of interdicting ships without nationality in relation to maritime crimes can be a question of a general nature: when fighting against illicit drug trafficking must the principle of the exclusive jurisdiction of the flag state really be considered untouchable?

Professor Fernando Loureiro Bastos is Associate Professor of Public Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Lisbon. He is Head of the Research Group on International and European Law of the Lisbon Public Law Research Centre and President of the Portuguese Society of International Law (Portuguese Branch of the International Law Association) and a member of the ILA Committee on International Law and Sea Level Rise. He has served as Co-Agent and Counsel of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau, Case 19 – M/V “Virginia G”, ITLOS (2011-2014).

Commentator: Dr Tor Krever, ‘Piracy as a maritime crime’.

Chair: Mr Stratis Georgilas (G-H Law Chambers, Athens)

Lecture summary: Recent pathbreaking trade agreements empower trade policymakers to target foreign companies in novel ways and to police corporate due diligence in global supply chains rather than seek to change foreign government behavior as used to be their purview. This repurposing of our trade enforcement system has the power to transform dramatically the global commercial system, the bargains it manages, the procedures applicable to it, and the rights and obligations of all involved.

This research project maps the institutional ascent of this revealed practice, which it maintains was the product of disillusionment with the intellectual pedigrees of conventional trade law. The project evaluates our trade policing in light of the progressive aims policymakers have set for it, taking into account the many constituencies on whom the burdens fall unevenly. This excavation exposes how our trade police do not operate like other widely accepted forms of law enforcement or of international law bureaucracy. Tactics like those in the new arsenal bear close resemblance to the practices of authoritarian governments that seek to provoke acquiescence without process. The project’s assessment prescribes lessons for the several disciplines trade policing touches, including for the way scholars and lawmakers conceive of what bodies of law, tools, and actors are best suited to manage transnational corporate behavior and for concepts of compliance in international law. Finally, this project demonstrates that, as a corporate accountability system, trade policing has leapfrogged efforts by fields with similar aims like business and human rights, and the policing tools we have so far are just the tip of the iceberg.

Kathleen Claussen is a leader in international economic law and procedure and has served as arbitrator, counsel, expert, public servant, and teacher. Her expertise covers several topics of international law, especially trade, investment, international business and labor; dispute settlement and international dispute bodies; national security and cybersecurity law; and, administrative law issues surrounding U.S. foreign relations and transnational agreements.

Professor Claussen has served as a visiting faculty member or invited researcher at numerous institutions around the world, including Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the University of Cambridge Lauterpacht Centre for International Law where she was a Brandon Fellow, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, the iCourts Center of Excellence at the University of Copenhagen, the George C. Marshall Center for Security Studies, the University of Zurich and Collegium Helveticum, and the World Trade Institute. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty in 2023, she was a member of the faculty at the University of Miami School of Law for five years.

Devika Hovell is an Associate Professor in Public International Law at the London School of Economics. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, a Master of Laws from New York University and an Arts/Law degree from the University of Western Australia. She served as Associate to Justice Kenneth Hayne at the High Court of Australia, and as judicial clerk at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, before starting her academic career at the University of New South Wales. She joined the London School of Economics in 2012. She is author of The Power of Process (edited by Oxford University Press) and has published articles in a range of journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the European Journal of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law and the Modern Law Review. The article the subject of this lecture will be published in the centennial volume of the British Yearbook of International Law. She is on the Editorial Board of the European Journal of International Law and is one of four editors of the international law blog, EJIL Talk!.

Dr Tibisay Morgandi is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Energy and Natural Resources Law at Queen Mary University of London, School of Law.

Professor Lorand Bartels is Professor of International Law, University of Cambridge.

Lavanya Rajamani is a Professor of International Environmental Law, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, and Yamani Fellow in Public International Law, St Peter's College, Oxford. Lavanya writes, teaches and advises on international climate change law. She has been closely involved in the climate change negotiations in various capacities for two decades, including as advisor to Chairs, Presidencies, and the Secretariat. She was part of the core UNFCCC drafting and advisory group for the Paris Agreement. And a Coordinating Lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report. She is also currently involved in providing the evidence base for ongoing climate change litigation in national, regional and international courts.

Now is therefore an ideal time to spotlight the new ESG disclosure requirements in the UK and EU and, against this backdrop, to refute the claim that ESG disclosure involves “major questions” that transcend the SEC’s longstanding and clear authority to impose new reporting requirements on publicly traded companies. The UK and EU experiences likewise provide valuable perspectives in connection with other hot-button issues in the US, including: closing the public-private disclosure gap, broadening the traditional concept of materiality, and imposing mandates that require real-time disclosure as opposed to disclosure primarily at periodic intervals.

Donna M. Nagy is the C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington, Indiana, USA. She teaches and writes in the areas of securities litigation, securities regulation, and corporations, and has served for eight years as the law school’s Executive Associate Dean. Her scholarship includes two co-authored books, one on the law of insider trading and a casebook on Securities Litigation, Enforcement, and Compliance. She has published extensively in distinguished law journals on matters including insider trading and fiduciary principles; securities disclosure and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information; government officials and financial conflicts of interest; and securities enforcement remedies. She is also a frequent speaker on securities regulation and litigation topics at law schools and professional conferences. Professor Nagy is a member of the American Law Institute and served as a member of the National Adjudicatory Council of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and as an appointed member to the ABA Corporate Laws Committee. She began her teaching career in 1994, and prior to that, was an associate with Debevoise & Plimpton in Washington, D.C. She earned her law degree in 1989 from New York University School of Law and her BA in Political Science in 1986 from Vassar College.

A series of three lectures by Dr. B.S.Chimni, Distinguished Professor of International Law, O.P. Jindal Global University. Previously, he was for over three decades Professor of International Law, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Between 2004-2006 he was the Vice Chancellor of the W.B. National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. He has been a Visiting Professor at Brown and Tokyo universities, the Graduate Institute, Geneva and the American University of Cairo, and has been visiting fellow at Harvard, Minnesota, and York (Canada) universities and the Institute of Advanced Studies, Nantes. He is an associate member of Institut de Droit International, and Member, Academic Council, Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP), Harvard Law School. He is former Vice-President Asian Society of International law and at present Member of its Advisory Council. He is a member of the editorial board of American Journal of International Law and also the former Editor-in-Chief of the Indian Journal of International Law. In 2022 he was honored by the American Society of International Law with its Honorary Membership. The University of London has instituted a scholarship in his name for the MA in Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies by distance-learning. He has also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is the author of International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches. He is closely associated with the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement.

A series of three lectures by Dr. B.S.Chimni, Distinguished Professor of International Law, O.P. Jindal Global University. Previously, he was for over three decades Professor of International Law, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Between 2004-2006 he was the Vice Chancellor of the W.B. National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. He has been a Visiting Professor at Brown and Tokyo universities, the Graduate Institute, Geneva and the American University of Cairo, and has been visiting fellow at Harvard, Minnesota, and York (Canada) universities and the Institute of Advanced Studies, Nantes. He is an associate member of Institut de Droit International, and Member, Academic Council, Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP), Harvard Law School. He is former Vice-President Asian Society of International law and at present Member of its Advisory Council. He is a member of the editorial board of American Journal of International Law and also the former Editor-in-Chief of the Indian Journal of International Law. In 2022 he was honored by the American Society of International Law with its Honorary Membership. The University of London has instituted a scholarship in his name for the MA in Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies by distance-learning. He has also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is the author of International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches. He is closely associated with the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement.

A series of three lectures by Dr. B.S.Chimni, Distinguished Professor of International Law, O.P. Jindal Global University. Previously, he was for over three decades Professor of International Law, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Between 2004-2006 he was the Vice Chancellor of the W.B. National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. He has been a Visiting Professor at Brown and Tokyo universities, the Graduate Institute, Geneva and the American University of Cairo, and has been visiting fellow at Harvard, Minnesota, and York (Canada) universities and the Institute of Advanced Studies, Nantes. He is an associate member of Institut de Droit International, and Member, Academic Council, Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP), Harvard Law School. He is former Vice-President Asian Society of International law and at present Member of its Advisory Council. He is a member of the editorial board of American Journal of International Law and also the former Editor-in-Chief of the Indian Journal of International Law. In 2022 he was honored by the American Society of International Law with its Honorary Membership. The University of London has instituted a scholarship in his name for the MA in Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies by distance-learning. He has also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is the author of International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches. He is closely associated with the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement.

Both the trade and investment regimes preserve policy space through a process of justification at the dispute settlement stage. Policy justification is built into most trade agreements (and some investment treaties) through formal exceptions clauses. Even in the absence of such clauses, exceptions-style justification has informally penetrated both regimes through adjudicative reasoning and borrowing. This "exceptions paradigm" of justification has worked well in trade treaties, where it has been especially key to securing a workable balance in the WTO/GATT context – in a coherent way, on which actors can plan ex ante. But, where tried, the exceptions paradigm has not worked out in the investment regime. I argue that the difference lies in the institutions within which trade and investment rules and exceptions are embedded. This lecture compares the trade and investment regimes across three institutional nodes: (1) the nature of the right of action (public vs private); (2) the degree of judicial centralization (court system vs ad hoc arbitration); and (3) the available remedies (prospective injunctive relief vs retrospective damages). I suggest that it is trade law's public-oriented institutions that have made the exceptions clause workable – not the other way around. By contrast, investment law's private-oriented institutions make that system particularly inhospitable to exceptions-style justification.

Julian Arato is a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. His scholarly expertise spans the areas of public international law, international economic law, and private law. Arato serves as a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law. He is active in the governance of the American Society of International Law, having recently served on the executive council and as co-chair of the international economic law interest group. He also serves as chair of the Academic Forum on Investor-State Dispute Settlement and as a member of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration Academic Council. Since 2018, Arato has served as an observer delegate to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Working Group III (ISDS Reform).

Anil is a Senior Lecturer at Essex Law School and a co-director of the Essex Business and Human Rights Project. Her research interests are in the fields of international investment law and business and human rights. Her research bridges the gap between corporate law, international investment law, human rights law, and tort law, examining how these areas can and should interact to operationalise human rights standards in the modern business context. She has published works on parent-subsidiary relationships in the business and human rights context, non-financial reporting, duty of care in supply chain relationships, human rights in investment contracts and the embedded inequalities in the investment treaty regime. She is the author of The Nationality of Corporate Investors under International Investment Law (2020, Hart Publishing), a member of the IEL Collective’s steering committee and a member of Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum’s governance committee.

Reading material: https://www.uninnovation.network/assets/BeSci/UN_Behavioural_Science_Report_2021.pdf

Anne van Aaken (Dr. iur. and MA Economics) is Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Law and Economics, Legal Theory, Public International Law and European Law and Director of the Institute of Law and Economics, University of Hamburg. She was Vice-President of the European Society of International Law and is Chair of the European University Institute Research Council. She is a general editor of Journal of International Dispute Settlement and a member of the editorial boards of AJIL, the Journal of International Economic Law, International Theory, and EJIL (until 2021). She was a guest professor in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the USA (Global Law Professor at NYU and Columbia). She has been expert consultant for the IBRD, UNCTAD, GIZ, OECD and the UN High Level Advisory Board of Effective Multilateralism. Her research focuses on international (economic) law, international governance, behavioral economics/psychology and international legal theory. She has published widely on those topics.

The fact that Article 31’s “General Rule Of Interpretation” and Article 32’s “Supplementary Means Of Interpretation” are presented to the adjudicator as a unit, and not seriatim, has resulted in some arbitral tribunals not treating those two articles of the VCLT as being hierarchical, and instead applying what has become known as the “crucible approach,” i.e., stirring the two in the pot of deliberations as though they were a regulatory potpourri rather than distinct rules, the later to be applied only if the first did not produce an unchallengable “ordinary meaning.” Thus separate approaches to the VCLT have arisen that have raised the question posed by former ICJ President Schwebel: “May Preparatory Work Be Used to Correct Rather Than Confirm the ‘Clear’ Meaning of a Treaty Provision?”

Judge Charles N Brower’s career has been divided between private law practice, first with White & Case LLP in New York City and Washington, D.C., since 2001 as an Arbitrator Member of Twenty Essex Chambers in London, and public service, first with the Office of The Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State (1969-73)(successively as Assistant Legal Adviser for European Affairs, Deputy Legal Adviser and Acting Legal Adviser), as Judge of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal (1983-present), as sub-Cabinet rank Deputy Special Counsellor to the President of the United States dealing with the Iran-Contra affair (1987), as Judge ad hoc of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (1999-2002)(appointed by Bolivia), and the most -appointed of the only five Americans ever to be appointed Judge ad hoc of the International Court of Justice (2014-2022) (appointed by Colombia (1 case) and the United States (2 cases)).

Judge Brower's book: 'Judging Iran: A Memoir of The Hague, The White House, and Life on the Front Line of International Justice' is available now to pre-order and will be released on 11 April 2023.

Professor Eyal Benvenisti is Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law, Columbia Law School (2022). He is the Whewell Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge, CC Ng Fellow in Law at Jesus College, and the Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member of the Global Visiting Faculty of New York University School of Law. He is Member of the Institut de droit international and of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities. A Co-Editor of the British Yearbook of International Law, he served on the Editorial Board of the American Journal of International Law (2009-18). He was Project Director of the “GlobalTrust – Sovereigns as Trustees of Humanity” research project, funded by an ERC Advanced Grant (2013-18). He previously was a Visiting Professor at the law schools at Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Toronto and Yale. He gave special courses at The Hague Academy of International Law (2013) and the Xiamen Academy of International Law (2017). Benvenisti will deliver the General Course in International Law at The Hague Academy of International Law in 2024.

Dr Loveday Hodson is Associate Professor at the University of Leicester.

I joined Leicester Law School in 2004, since which time I have had a number of teaching and administrative roles. For the past few years I have taught on the International Law undergraduate module as well as convening the Feminist Perspectives on International Law and Legal Responses to Global Injustice postgraduate modules. During my time at Leicester I also contribute to the teaching of Constitutional and Administrative Law. I am currently the School's Deputy PRG Tutor (admissions) and Research Ethics Officer.

Professor Yuval Shany is the Hersch Lauterpacht Chair in International Law and former Dean of the Law Faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a member of the UN Human Rights Committee from 2013 to 2020 and served for one year during that time as Chair of the Committee. He serves, at present, as a senior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, and as the head of the CyberLaw program of the Hebrew University CyberSecurity Research Center. He is also serving this years as the co-director of the Center for Transnational Legal Studies at King’s College, London.

Noah Feldman is Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Chairman of the Society of Fellows, and founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, all at Harvard University. He specializes in constitutional studies, with particular emphasis on power and ethics, design of innovative governance solutions, law and religion, and the history of legal ideas.

A policy & public affairs columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, Feldman also writes for The New York Review of Books and was a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine for nearly a decade. He hosts the Deep Background podcast, an interview show that explores the historical, scientific, legal and cultural context behind the biggest stories in the news.

Through his consultancy, Ethical Compass, Feldman advises clients like Facebook & eBay on how to improve ethical decision-making by creating and implementing new governance solutions. In this capacity, he conceived and architected the Facebook Oversight Board, and continues to advise the company on ethics and governance issues.

Further information: https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/noah-r-feldman/

For more about the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, see: https://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/

Lecture summary: In this talk I am inviting you on a sightseeing tour in The Hague, the ‘International City of Peace and Justice’. But it is not a tour from A to B and back. It is a tour in the form of a collage, assembled from artworks, texts, and objects from or about institutions of international law. Through a cacophony of shifting perspectives and modalities, I try to (un)make sense of international institutional sites as a spaces of encounter and exclusion.

Dr Sofia Stolk is a researcher in international law at the Asser Institute in The Hague and the University of Amsterdam. Her research project 'Imagining Justice' focuses on the use of visual means by international courts and tribunals and explores how different audiences engage with international law through its representation in visual media. She has published about the intersection of international law and art, architecture, theater, and film. Her monograph ‘The Opening Statement of the Prosecution in International Criminal Trials: A Solemn Tale of Horror’ was published by Routledge in 2021. Sofia coordinates the Camera Justitia programme on law and social justice at the annual Movies that Matter Festival is co-founder of the Legal Sightseeing platform (www.legalsightseeing.org) together with Dr. Renske Vos (VU Amsterdam).

This event, divided into two panels, showcases recent scholarship in international criminal law and international humanitarian law. Transcending disciplinary boundaries and theoretical traditions whilst harnessing extensive archival research and deeper empirical data, these scholars’ work reimagines two venerable legal fields anew through more robust historicizing and bolder critiques.

Professor Andrew Lang joined the Edinburgh School of Law in 2017 as the Chair in International Law and Global Governance. Prior to that, he was Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. He is an expert in Public International Law, with a specialty in International Economic Law and the Law of the World Trade Organization. He has a combined BA/LLB from the University of Sydney, where he was a double University Medallist, and his PhD is from the University of Cambridge.

Despite this historic legal framework based on visions of equity, common interest, environmental health and prosperity for all, tensions are rising. In late June 2021, the Government of the Republic of Nauru called for the ISA to accelerate its work on regulations for exploitation of deep seabed minerals so that NORI, its sponsored entity, could submit an application for authorization to mine as soon as 2023. Just prior to that, hundreds of marine scientists and policy experts issued a Call for a Pause to Deep-Sea Mining, expressing concern that deep-sea mining could result “in the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning that would be irreversible on multi-generational timescales.” In September 2021, members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) adopted a resolution calling upon IUCN Member States to support and implement a moratorium on deep seabed mining until specific conditions have been satisfied, including improved scientific understanding, independent review, application of precaution and institutional reforms (IUCN, 2021 WCC Motion 069).

Despite recognizing the need for rigorous and binding environmental safeguards, the Secretary General of the ISA has described the rising calls for a moratorium on deep seabed mining in the Area as “anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti-development and anti-international law.” All this is happening at the same time the United Nations is developing a new agreement under UNCLOS for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national boundaries, and the UN Ocean Envoy, Peter Thomson has called on the global community to recognize the importance of ensuring “synergy between the forthcoming global conferences addressing climate change, biodiversity loss and the well-being of the ocean.” (Open letter by Peter Thomson, UN Special Envoy for the Ocean, to Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC). The Open Letter further stresses that “the days are gone when any one of these existential challenges can be meaningfully negotiated without bringing the other two to the table.”

This presentation will explore these issues in light of the legal regime established under UNCLOS and its 1994 Implementation Agreement, modern environmental norms, procedural principles and current scientific understanding about deep sea ecosystems and the potential impacts of deep seabed mining. It will further describe prior examples of internationally declared “moratoria” or conditional pauses on specific activities. Finally, it will explore some pathways ahead for addressing the potential contradictions between deep sea mining and protection of marine biodiversity beyond national boundaries.

(With many thanks to Pradeep Singh, LLM, Researcher, University of Bremen, who co-authored and assisted with this presentation)

Kristina M. Gjerde, J.D., is Senior High Seas Advisor to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s Global Marine and Polar Programme. Kristina received her Juris Doctor from New York University School of Law with a focus on comparative and international law, and practiced admiralty law for several years in a New York City law firm. For the past 30+ years, Kristina has focused on the nexus of law, science, and policy relevant to sustaining marine biodiversity. Kristina has co-founded four science-policy partnerships: the Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative, The Sargasso Sea Project, the High Seas Alliance and the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative (DOSI). In addition to advancing a new UN treaty for marine life beyond boundaries, she has authored or co-authored more than 150 publications. Kristina is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Edinburgh School of Geosciences, an adjunct professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Roger O’Keefe is Professor of International Law at Bocconi University, Milan and Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Laws, University College London, where from 2014 to 2018 he was Professor of Public International Law. From 2000 to 2014 he lectured in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, was a Fellow of Magdalene College, and was a Fellow and, from 2003, Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. He is joint General Editor of the Oxford University Press series Oxford Monographs in International Law.

Dr. Cheah W.L. is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law of the National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2007. She holds academic qualifications from the National University of Singapore (LL.B., LL.M.), Harvard Law School (LL.M.), and Oxford University (D.Phil). She conducts research in the core disciplines of international criminal law, transitional justice, and human rights law with a focus on the intersections of law, culture, and power. Within these areas, her research explores the diverse and complex roles performed by domestic and international criminal courts beyond their paradigm aim of adjudicating on the guilt or otherwise of those charged with criminal offences. Her work has been accepted for publication in journals such as the Leiden Journal of International Law, European Journal of International Law, Michigan Journal of International Law, Journal of International Criminal Justice, Human Rights Quarterly, and Harvard Human Rights Journal.

My publications and work may be found at: https://cheahwuiling.com/ and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1102439

Rethinking the family as a ‘basic element of society’ (American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man), grounded in time, space, human mobility and our political-economic systems, could help us see more fully ‘who’ constitutes the Americas, which is an essential for a human rights system aspiring to be universally applicable across the Americas.

Tracy Robinson is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Law, The University of the West Indies, Mona, and serves as Deputy Dean, Graduate Studies and Research. She researches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, family law, human rights law and gender, sexuality and the law. She is a co-founder and co-coordinator (with Arif Bulkan) of the Faculty of Law UWI Rights Advocacy Project (U-RAP) that led successful strategic litigation in Belize and Guyana on the criminalization of LGBTQ persons. She served on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as a Commissioner, President of the body (2014-2015), Rapporteur on the Rights of Women and inaugural Rapporteur on the Rights of LGBTI people. In 2020, she was appointed as one of three experts on the Independent Fact Finding Mission on Libya, a mandate established by the UN Human Rights Council.

This lecture is part of the Cambridge Arbitration Society (CUArb)/Lauterpacht Centre for International Law lecture series.

Speakers: Iain Mckenny, Profile Investment & Louis Young, Augusta Ventures

Chair: Ibrahim Alturki

Professor Cymie R. Payne is a member of the Rutgers University faculty, where she teaches international and environmental law. She has appeared as counsel before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in its deep seabed mining and fisheries advisory opinion cases and as expert on environmental reparations in the International Court of Justice case Certain Activities (Costa Rica v. Nicaragua). Currently, she is legal advisor to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) delegation to the intergovernmental conference for a legally binding agreement on conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) and Chair of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law - Ocean, Coasts and Coral Reefs Specialist Group. She participated, as counsel for the United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), in reparations for environmental damage due to armed conflict and in the creation of a related environmental award oversight program to ensure that awards were used to restore the environmental harm. She is the editor, with Peter H. Sand, of Gulf War Reparations and the UN Compensation Commission: Environmental Liability (Oxford University Press 2011). She has also been a member of the Berkeley Law faculty and served as attorney with the U.S. Department of the Interior and the law firm of Goodwin, Procter. She holds a MA from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, and is a Fellow of the American College of Environmental Lawyers. She was a member of the International Law Association Committee on Sustainable Natural Resource Management For Development.

In this talk, Anthea introduces her book, co-authored with Nicolas Lamp, Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why it Matters, exploring the interests, logics, and ideologies driving these intractable debates. Examining six competing narratives about the virtues and vices of globalization, Anthea and Nicolas provide a framework for understanding current debates about economic globalization and showcase a more integrative way of thinking about complex problems. Their approach not only helps enable us to understand where we have come apart but also how we might come back together.

Flyer: Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why it Matters

Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters

Anthea Roberts is a Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) who specializes in public international law, international trade and investment law, and the effect of geopolitical change on global governance. From 2008-2015, she taught at the London School of Economics, Columbia Law School and Harvard Law School. Anthea has chaired the ANU Working Group on Geoeconomics since 2018 and was a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School teaching Geoeconomics in 2020. She is currently teaching courses on complexity, risk and resilience.

In 2019, the League of Scholars named Anthea the world’s leading international law scholar and Australia’s leading law scholar based on the quality of her publications and the quantity of citations they had received in the previous five years. Her last book, Is International Law International? (2017), won numerous prizes, including the American Society of International Law’s Book Prize, and was Oxford University Press’s top-selling law monograph worldwide in 2017-2018. Anthea is currently working on a variety of projects about governing in complex, contested and evolving fields.

Dame Sally Davies is the 40th Master of Trinity College, Cambridge University, the UK Government’s Special Envoy on AMR and the chair of The Trinity Challenge, which she set up in May 2020. Before this, from March 2011 to September 2019, she was Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for England and Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government. Dame Sally was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Executive Board 2014-2016 and led delegations to a range of WHO summits and forums since 2004. Dame Sally advocates globally on AMR: for three years, Dame Sally was the chair of the WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on AMR and later co-convener of the UN Inter-Agency Co-ordination Group on AMR, set up in response to the AMR declaration made at UNGA 2016. Dame Sally is a member of the UN Global Leaders Group on AMR, since 2020, serving alongside Heads of State, Ministers and prominent figures from around the world. Dame Sally is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the US Academy of Science. In the 2020 New Year’s Honours, Dame Sally was appointed Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) for services to public health and research, having received her DBE in 2009.

Clive Aston – Arbitrator, LMAA Past President

Can Yeginsu – Barrister, 4 New Square

Dr Hayk Kupelyants – Associate, Dechert

The CUArb aims at promoting the study of international commercial and investment arbitration amongst students, academics, alumni and law practitioners. It seeks to serve as both an educational and networking platform to facilitate discussions on emerging topics in international arbitration and connect students with practitioners.

The CUArb runs a few projects including annual conferences, annual lectures series, preparatory seminars for the Vis Moot competition, educational workshops on arbitration and an arbitration lap. Membership of the CUArb is open to all members at the University of Cambridge and individuals interested in the study and practice of international commercial and investment arbitration.

Speakers:

Samaa Haridi – Partner, Hogan Lovells

Prof Anne Marie Whitesell – Professor, Georgetown University

James T. Gathii is the Wing-Tat Lee Chair in International Law and Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law since July 2012.

Dr Giorgio Risso – Associate, Cleary Gottlieb

Agnieszka Zarówna – Associate, White & Case

Lecture summary: At the heart of this lecture is the question of how music could serve as an effective instrumental tool for rethinking the theoretical and processual dimensions of international law in Africa. This lecture argues that socially conscious songs provide a beneficial lens/gateway to the popular understanding of the problematics of international law. As Daniel Newman rightly noted, “the use of popular music offers a writer a valuable device to render what could be quite dry and, otherwise dull, argument suddenly more interesting and thus engaging to the reader”. Such knowledge further engenders the possibility of repurposing the applicative dimensions of international law on the continent.

Babatunde Fagbayibo is a Professor in Law at the University of South Africa. He graduated with a doctoral degree in Public Law, with specialisation in regional integration law, from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His research interests include supranational regionalism, transnational policy analysis, critical approaches to international law, and governance and democratisation in Africa. His writings have been published in several academic journals, as chapters in books, and on other online platforms. In 2014, he was recognised by the Young People in International Affairs (YPIA) as one of the top 35 Africans under the age of 35 for his research in the field of supranational regionalism in Africa. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Southern African Public Law Journal (SAPL) and is on the editorial boards of the African Journal of Democracy and Governance (RADG) and the Nigerian Yearbook of International Law (NYIL).

This Enlightenment project of regular war is contrasted with late-19th century humanitarianism, which had serious misgivings about reason of state and sovereignty itself. Restraint through humanitarian action was possible only with state support, but it resulted from neutral rescue action and moral condemnation.

The lecture shows how these two conflicting conceptions of restraint came together in the first codified instruments of the laws of war, and how they are still present in the law of armed conflict. It concludes by discussing some implications of this genealogical analysis for contemporary debates on the convergence of international humanitarian, human rights, and criminal law.

Pablo Kalmanovitz is research professor and head of the International Studies Division at CIDE, in Mexico City, and general editor of the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law. He has held permanent or visiting positions at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, the European University Institute, Yale University, McGill University, and the University of Ulster. His research focuses on historical and theoretical aspects of the international regulation of armed force, on which he has published numerous articles and book chapters. His book The Laws of War in International Thought was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

This conversation will explore the significance, possibilities, and limits of researching international law from a “history and theory” approach. The distinctiveness of international legal analysis to understand crucial developments from decolonization to neoliberalism, and the political nature and economic foundations of legal form and legal formalism will serve as our starting points. The event will last one hour. Marina and Francisco will lead the conversation for ~40 minutes after which they will pass the pleasure and responsibility on to the audience.

Umut Özsu is Associate Professor at the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. He is a scholar of public international law, the history and theory of international law, and Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state. He is the author of Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford University Press, 2015), and is currently finalizing Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). He is also co-editor of the Research Handbook on Law and Marxism (Edward Elgar, forthcoming) and The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, 2019), as well as several journal symposia.

Matiangai Sirleaf is the Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law. Professor Sirleaf writes and teaches in the areas of global public health law, public international law, international human rights law, international criminal law, post-conflict and transitional justice and criminal law. She recently joined the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Law as a professor of law. Professor Sirleaf previously served as an associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, as an assistant professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law and as a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

This talk will present one chapter of a book project investigating this domain of ‘digital humanitarianism’ – a chapter concerned with maps and mapping. It focuses on recent shifts from two-dimensional mapping for humanitarian ends towards multi-dimensional, real-time mapping for the same purposes, associated with geographic information systems (GIS) and the generation and deployment of map cubes (multi-dimensional arrays of data values presenting cartographic visualization of each dimension). It offers a brief recollection of humanitarian mapping through “snapshots” from the practice in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries (Valentine Seaman’s yellow fever maps; Charles Booth’s poverty maps; Bangladesh flood mapping; and the FAO’s Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Information and Mapping Systems). Against this background, we will consider the rise of crowd-sourcing as a digitally facilitated way of making cartographic knowledge for humanitarian governance purposes, as illustrated by the Missing Maps Project (a joint project of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team – a U.S.-registered non-profit – and three other not-for-profit organizations: American Red Cross; British Red Cross; and Médecins Sans Frontières). We will explore how this affects how particular spaces are assembled, delimited, surveyed and readied for humanitarian intervention and with what implications for international legal relations and the jurisdiction of different actors on this terrain.

Fleur Johns is Professor in the Faculty of Law, working in the areas of public international law, legal theory, law and development, law and society (or socio-legal studies), and law and technology. Fleur studies emergent patterns of governance on the global plane, and their social, political and economic implications, employing an interdisciplinary approach that draws on the social sciences and humanities and combines the study of public and private law. In 2021, Fleur will commence a four-year Australian Research Council Future Fellowship working on a project entitled 'Diplomatic Knowledge, Disasters and the Future of International Legal Order'. In 2021-2022, Fleur will be a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Fleur is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

There are two different applicable international regimes, one for the ocean and the other for climate change. Yet neither has a clear mandate for the ocean-climate nexus. The 1982 United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea, often referred to as the Constitution for the oceans, negotiated before climate change emerged on the international agenda, makes no reference to climate change. The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, with a clear mandate for atmospheric climate change, limits the role of the ocean to serving as sink or reservoir for greenhouse gases. The 2015 Paris Agreement added little more other than a preambular reference to ocean ecosystems.

The lecture will examine whether and how these two principal legal regimes can meet the test for international law in providing a dialectic and evolutive response to the pressing challenges of the climate-ocean nexus.

Nilüfer Oral is Director of the Centre of International Law (CIL) at the National University of Singapore and a member of the law faculty at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. She is member of the UN International Law Commission and co-chair of the study group on sea-level rise in relation to international law. She served as climate change negotiator for the Turkish Ministry (2009 – 2016). She has also appeared before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Nilufer Oral is a Distinguished Fellow of the Law of the Sea Institute at Berkeley Law (University of California Law Berkeley); Senior Fellow of the National University of Singapore Law School; and Honorary Research Fellow at University of Dundee. Dr. Oral was elected to the Council of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (2012-2016) and served as Chair of the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law (2014-2017). She is currently a member of the Steering Committee of the World Commission on Environmental Law.

Dr Oral is the series editor for the International Straits of the World publications (Brill); member of the Board of Editors of the European Society of International Law Series; Board of Editors of the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law; Associate Editor of the Research Perspectives in the Law of the Sea (Brill); and International Advisory Board, Chinese Journal of Environmental Law (Brill) She has published numerous articles edited several books, and has spoken at many international conferences.

Commander Ian Park is a logistics officer and barrister in the Royal Navy and has served in seven ships and deployed worldwide in support of the Royal Navy’s contribution to defence. He has also deployed as a legal adviser on operations to Afghanistan and, on many occasions, to the Middle East. Ian is, or has been, a Hudson Fellow at Oxford University, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School, a First Sea Lord’s Fellow and a Freeman of the City of London. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge, has a doctorate in law from Balliol College, Oxford and has lectured at Harvard Law School, Cambridge University, Oxford University, The Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing, Hanoi University, USSH Hanoi and Freiburg University amongst other institutions. Ian is the author of, inter alia, ‘The Right to Life in Armed Conflict’ (Oxford University Press, 2018) and in 2018 was the winner of the outstanding performance by an HM Forces barrister at the UK Bar Awards.

Vanessa Ogle is associate professor of modern European history at the University of California - Berkeley, where she works on the history of capitalism, political economy, empire and decolonization, and legal history. She obtained her PhD from Harvard University and taught at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Berkeley. Her first book, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950, was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. Her current book project is Archipelago Capitalism: A History of the Offshore World, 1920s-1980s. It is the first archivally-based account of how the contemporary landscape of offshore tax havens, money markets, and flags of convenience shipping registries came into existence, with lasting implications for the rise of inequality throughout the twentieth century. Articles based off the project have appeared in the American Historical Review and most recently, in Past & Present.

Professor Robert Howse is the Lloyd C. Nelson Professor of International Law at NYU School of Law. Professor Howse received his B.A. in philosophy and political science with high distinction, as well as an LL.B., with honours, from the University of Toronto, where he was co-editor in chief of the Faculty of Law Review. He also holds an LL.M. from the Harvard Law School. He has been a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Paris 1 (Pantheon-Sorbonne), Tsinghua University, and Osgoode Hall Law School in Canada and taught in the Academy of European Law, European University Institute, Florence.

Alejandro Chehtman is Professor of Law at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina) and a Fellow at the Argentine National Research Council (CONICET). He specializes in International Criminal Law, International Humanitarian Law, and on empirical work on courts and tribunals. His work has been published in the European Journal of International Law, Legal Theory, Journal of International Criminal Justice, Leiden Journal of International Law, Law & Philosophy, and the Journal of Law & Courts, among others. He published The Philosophical Foundations of Extraterritorial Punishment (Oxford University Press), and is currently finishing a monograph on A Theory of Asymmetrical Conflicts (forthcoming with Oxford University Press).

Prof Carlos Esposito, University Autónoma of Madrid: "Privacy and New Technologies in the Time of COVID-19"

Dr Calvin Ho, University of Hong Kong: 'Ethical and Regulatory Issues in the Vaccine Race'

Prof Bartha Maria Knoppers, McGill University: 'The Right to Benefit From Science and Genomic Data Sharing in the Time of COVID-19'

Prof Jorge Viñuales, University of Cambridge: 'Regulating new zoonotic disease outbreaks: international legal frames'

Moderator: Dr Rumiana Yotova, University of Cambridge

Professor Andrew Serdy is Professor of the Public International Law of the Sea at the University of Southampton.

Grotius theory of the state holds important lessons and implications for our contemporary world, where over the last 25 years we have grappled constantly with the problem of what a state is, the circumstances under which we might justifiably breach its sovereignty, and the profound difficulties of re-making state orders when they have failed, collapsed or been destroyed by foreign intervention.

Professor Nehal Bhuta holds the Chair of Public International Law at University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law. He previously held the Chair of Public International Law at the European University Institute in Florence, where was also Co-Director of the Institute's Academy of European Law. He is a member of the editorial boards of the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Constellations and a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity. He is also a series editor of the Oxford University Press (OUP) series in The History and Theory of International Law. Prior to the EUI he was on the faculty at the New School for Social Research, and at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Before entering academia, he worked with Human Rights Watch and the International Center for Transitional Justice. Nehal’s two most recent edited volumes are Freedom of Religion, Secularism and Human Rights (OUP) and Autonomous Weapons Systems - Law, Ethics, Policy (Cambridge University Press with Beck, Geiss, Liu and Kress). Nehal works on a wide range of doctrinal, historical and theoretical issues in international law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law and human rights law. He is about to start work as a General Editor (with Anthony Pagden and Mira Siegelberg) of The Cambridge History of Rights (5 volumes).

In this talk, I argue that the failure to recognise these conflicts comprehensively undermines the heritage community’s response to the legal demands made by the Hague Convention. If we refuse to acknowledge that these conflicts can even in principle arise, we are ill-equipped to deal with them. Given that the Hague Convention requires combatants to deal with them, this is a pressing problem.

Monica Hakimi is the James V. Campbell Professor of Law and the Associate Dean for Faculty and Research at the University of Michigan Law School. Her research ties together doctrine and theory to examine how international law adapts to contemporary challenges, particularly in the areas of human and national security.

Welcome by Dr Ivan Berkowitz

Chaired by Professor Eyal Benvenisti

Radhika Coomaraswamy received her BA from Yale University, her J.D. from Columbia University and her LLM from Harvard University. In Sri Lanka, she was Director of International Centre for Ethnic Studies from 1982 to 2005 and the Chairperson of the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission from 2003 to 2006. Recently, from 2015-2018, she was a member of the Constitutional Council.

Internationally, Radhika Coomaraswamy served as UN Under Secretary General and as Special Representative of the Secretary General on Children and Armed Conflict from 2006 until her retirement in 2012.

Earlier, from 1994 to 2003, she was the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, an independent expert attached to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

In 2014, the UN Secretary General asked Radhika Coomaraswamy to lead the Global Study to review the fifteen year implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security.

In 2017 she was appointed to the UN Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar and also appointed as a member of The Secretary General’s Board of Advisors on Mediation.

She was been privileged to be asked to deliver the Grotius Lecture of the American Association of International Law in 2013 and has received numerous honorary degrees and honors.

These lectures are kindly supported by Dr and Mrs Ivan Berkowitz who are Friends of the Centre.

The conversation will focus on the role that critical approaches to international law have played and should play in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. We will look beyond the dominant disciplinary responses to COVID-19 and explore if and how international law can be employed strategically in this context. The relationship between international law and political economy will serve as our starting point, and from there we will explore the potential of international law to be used as a tool of politics of resistance and transformation. We will also discuss challenges and responsibilities of teaching international law at a time of crisis. Marina and Francisco will lead the conversation for ~45 minutes after which they will pass the responsibility on to the audience. This session will be hosted online via Zoom Webinar. Pre-registration is required and, in order to preserve the intimacy and informality that define the series, places are limited. Priority will be given to LCIL fellows and Cambridge students.

Speakers:

Ntina Tzouvala is an ARC Laureate Postdoctoral Fellow in International Law at Melbourne Law School. Her work focuses on the history and theory of international law, with a particular emphasis on international law and global capitalism. Her first monograph, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law, will be published by Cambridge University Press in late 2020.

Robert Knox is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool and an Editor of Historical Materialism and The London Review of International Law. He works primarily in the Marxist and critical legal traditions. His research touches on the relationship between international law, capitalism and imperialism (with a particular focus on questions of racialisation), on law’s key role in the birth and consolidation of neoliberalism and on the relationship between law and social change.

The most coveted appointment as a Research Professor (with less or no teaching) sends an undeniable signal and one does not get a grant which enables a buyout from research in order to focus on teaching. Most professors and lecturers fulfill their teaching duties faithfully, but it is a duty and few, especially in the major Research Universities think of their vocation as educators. One does not naturally think of teaching as worth spending the time, thought and creativity in the same manner we do on our "research". Most dream of being Great Scholars, not great teachers and educators. And if they did, the system would not prize them for that. Distinguished Lectures are typically meant to be an occasion to engage with the latest and most profound in scholarship. A good part of my scholarly effort is dedicated to thinking about how knowledge, insight and creativity can be translated and brought into the classroom. By this I do not mean rhetoric or teaching techniques, or teaching how to do research but the most profound and effective way of engaging our students with the actual content of that which it is our responsibility to teach. A well designed and creative class should, but does not in today's academia, count as much as a well designed and creative article. Taking this route will not, I hope, only honor the memory of Eli Lauterpacht in the most meaningful way I can think of, but perhaps also make a more lasting contribution than any 'scholarly' lecture.

Professor Weiler is University Professor at NYU Law School and Senior Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard. Until recently he served as President of the European University Institute, Florence. Prof Weiler is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law (EJIL) and the International Journal of Constitutional Law (ICON).

The 2017 lecture, entitled 'A return to the Caroline Correspondence, 1838-1842', was delivered at the Faculty of Law by Dino Kritsiotis, Professor of Public International Law, University of Nottingham.

Opening speeches were given by:

Professor Richard Fentiman, Chair, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Professor Eyal Benvenisti, Director, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge

Dame Rosalyn Higgins, Former President, International Court of Justice

Panel II: Professor Philippe Sands, University College London

The 2017 Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture series, entitled 'Privatisation Under and Of Public International Law' was delivered at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge, by Professor Anne Peters, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law Heidelberg , from Tuesday 7 to Friday 10 March 2017.

This part, entitled 'The Private Actions' Public Functions and Public International Law Constraints', is the third of the three lectures given.

The 2017 Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture series, entitled 'Privatisation Under and Of Public International Law' was delivered at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge, by Professor Anne Peters, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law Heidelberg , from Tuesday 7 to Friday 10 March 2017.

This part, entitled 'The Privatisation of International Organisations', is the second of the three lectures given.

This lecture, entitled 'US Courts and Transnational Justice: Domestic Politics, Extraterritoriality, and International Law', was delivered at the Lauterpacht Centre on Friday 13th May 2016 by Austen Parrish, Dean and James H. Rudy Professor of Law at Indiana University Bloomington’s Maurer School of Law.

Professor Fred H. Cate, Distinguished Professor and C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law, Maurer School of Law, Indiana University delivered the 2011 Snyder Lecture on Monday 14th November 2011.

Increasingly we live in a world of ubiquitous data and widely distributed power to collect, use, store, and share personal information. Data protection takes on new importance in an environment in which our activities, communications, transactions, and preferences are captured electronically and used to define our existence. Yet data protection laws, with their focus on transparency, consent, and regulatory oversight of every aspect of data processing are proving increasingly unworkable in the face of the deluge of digital data. The situation is exacerbated by the wide divergence among regional and national (and even local and provincial) laws used to regulate inherently global data flows. As reality and law grow further apart, individuals are left unprotected, industry and governments operate without meaningful oversight or certainty, and society lacks shared norms about the appropriate limits of data collection and use. This lecture addresses the scope of the problem and some practical steps for doing better.