Lecture summary: In this talk Sharifah Sekalala examines this critical moment in the making of Global Health Law, with two treaty making processes: the newly finalised revisions of the International Health Regulations and ongoing negotiations by the Intergovernmental Negotiation Body for a possible pandemic Accord or Instrument, as we well as soft-law proposals for the World Health Organization proposal for a medical countermeasures platform. 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.
Lecture summary: The United Nations Charter order (UNCO) and the co-evolved liberal international order (LIO) are contested with a heretofore unknown force. The steep rise in contestations in the realm of public politics rather than the courtroom demonstrates a shift from normal contestation as a source of legitimacy and ordering towards deep contestation as a political challenge of foundational elements of liberal order. Today, not only in the Global South but also across Europe and North America, sceptics of globalization on the political left and nationalist-populists on the political right are challenging the fundamental pillars of the LIO (i.e., democracy, economic openness, and multilateralism). The process is paired by growing contestations of international law that is codified in the UN Charter including contestation of core norms of the UNCO (i.e., non-intervention, human rights, and sovereignty). While the effect of deep contestation is unknowable, we do know however that normal contestation is the essence of everyday politics. The clash of interests, norms, and ideas is entirely normal. Yet, contestation can also be degenerative, moving political outcomes away from desired ends through ad hoc and perhaps inconsistent compromises. As core norms of the LIO and UNCO have become deeply contested, we require a better understanding about the expected effects. Access to contestation as the right to speak and participate in political decisions is a necessary condition for normative legitimacy and mutual recognition of the norms that govern us. Achieving this condition involves struggles about norm(ative) meaning-in-use which take place on distinct sites of global order. This raises a question about time, substance, and norm(ative) change in global order more generally and, more specifically, which elements of international order ought to be retained. The lecture posits that the observed qualitative shift from constitutive everyday contestations towards potentially degenerative political contestation calls for a methodological stocktake of how contestations work with regard to global re/ordering, i.e. whose practices count and whose norms ought to count in that process? 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.
Lecture summary: Part 1 of the Lecture focuses on the development of the right to self-determination as a rule of customary international law and its application to the Chagos Archipelago, Africa and the Commonwealth Caribbean. The adoption of Resolution 1514 by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 14, 1960 was a decisive element in the development of the customary character of the right to self-determination. After that transformational development it was colonial peoples, not colonial powers, who determined their independence and its form e.g. whether based on a republican system or a UK parliamentary system. Thus, after that time the colonial powers were under an obligation to respect the right of colonial peoples to ‘freely determine their political status’, and any breach of that obligation would entail their international responsibility. Part 11 addresses the status of the right to self-determination as a norm of jus cogens, and concludes that on the basis of the relevant evidentiary material, the right to self-determination is a peremptory norm of general international law. Part 111 focuses on the right to self-determination in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Disappointment is expressed at the lack of clarity in the ICJ’s treatment in its recent Advisory Opinion of the jus cogens character of the right to self-determination in cases of foreign occupation. Speaker: Judge Patrick Robinson 1. In 1964 graduated from the University College of the West Indies -London with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, Latin and Economics. 2. In 1968, called to the Bar at Middle Temple, in which year also completed the LLB degree from London University. In 1972, completed the LLM degree in International Law at Kings College, London University. 3. Jamaica’s representative to the Sixth (Legal) Committee of the UN General Assembly from 1972 to 1998. Led treaty -making negotiations on behalf of Jamaica in several areas, including extradition, mutual legal assistance and investment promotion and protection. 4. From 1988 to 1995, served as a member of the Inter American Commission on Human Rights, including as the President in 1991. From 1991 to 1996, member of the International Law Commission. From 1995 to 1996, member of the Haiti Truth and Justice Commission. 5. In 1998 elected a Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and served as the Tribunal’s President from 2008 to 2011; presided over the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. 6. In 2020 appointed Honorary President of the American Society of International Law (ASIL); in that capacity, in collaboration with ASIL and the University of the West Indies, organized two International Symposia which led to the launch on June 8, 2023 of the historic Report on Reparations for Transatlantic Chattel Slavery (TCS) in the Americas and the Caribbean, which quantified for the first time the reparations due from the practice of TCS in the Caribbean, Central America, South America and North America. 7. Elected a Judge of the International Court of Justice in 2014 and demitted office on February 5, 2024. 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.
Lecture summary: At a time where questions abound about the state and future of international cooperation and compliance across the international legal system, this lecture will consider the new partnership of countries established in 2019 to promote and protect media freedom globally – the Media Freedom Coalition of States. The Coalition offers a new paradigm that seeks to answer some of the systemic challenges to State cooperation and compliance today, here in the area of freedom of expression, and one that puts independent experts in international law at the very centre of its institutional and operational framework. 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.
Professor Daniel Bodansky’s seminal and widely acclaimed book The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law was first published in 2010. In contrast to other general works on international environmental law, the book focused on the processes of developing, implementing, and enforcing international environmental law rather than on legal doctrine. In order to comprehensively analyse these processes, the book is highly interdisciplinary, relying not only on the legal toolkit but integrating perspectives and lenses of political science and economics, as well as philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. 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.
Lecture summary: A growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship explores overlaps and interactions among different normative and institutional branches of international law. This lecture contributes to this scholarship through a case study of relations among international organizations in the mid-1960s, when several emerging political fault lines – between East and West, between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries, and between the established specialized agencies and newer institutions – brought the coherence of the international legal order into doubt. Drawing on original archival research, the lecture focusses on a single inter-agency meeting, held in Geneva in early July 1966, where these fault lines were exposed and debated at length. 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.
Lecture summary: In 2015, the United States military dropped a bomb on a hospital in Afghanistan run by Médecins Sans Frontières, killing forty-two staff and patients. Testifying afterwards before a Senate Committee, General John F. Campbell explained that “[t]he hospital was mistakenly struck.” In 2019, while providing air support to partner forces under attack by ISIS, the U.S. military killed dozens of women and children. Central Command concluded that any civilian deaths “were accidental.” In August 2021, during a rushed withdrawal from Afghanistan, the U.S. military executed a drone strike in Kabul that killed ten civilians, including an aid worker for a U.S. charity and seven children in his family. The Pentagon later admitted it was a “tragic mistake.” In these cases and others like them, no one set out to kill the civilians who died. Such events are usually chalked up as sad but inevitable consequences of war - as regrettable “mistakes.” 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.
Lecture summary: This lecture examines the treatment of marine genetic resources (MGR) in the negotiations and the text of the new Treaty on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ). The Treaty provides a coherent governance framework for MGR including an unexpected techno-fix to the most longstanding problem of biodiversity governance, some normative novelty on principles, and a trendsetting approach to valuation of aggregate usage of genetic resources. Yet, this painstakingly formed framework continues to be buffeted by self-interested attempts to redefine and relitigate the value of genetic resources; particularly around decoupling use from access to genetic resources, dematerialisation from physical resources and dis-enclosure under legal frameworks, all of which are now stable features in this and other Treaty-making contexts. How can we better characterise the success of the BBNJ Treaty in a way that helps resist de facto erosion following ratification? 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
Lecture summary: From European colonialism to the ‘post’colonial constellation, modern international law has developed in parallel with the changing legal forms of industrialised countries’ access to the natural resources of the global South. Following this development, we can see how imperial environmentalism was translated to the transnational law of natural resources. The historic perspective also highlights that the specific ambivalence of colonial and postcolonial environmental protection (exploitation vs. protection) is an ambivalence built into international law itself. In accordance with its colonial origins, international law has institutionalised a specific path to economic growth and development that presupposes and stabilises a world order supported by the industrialised countries of the North. At the same time, with the principle of equal sovereignty and self-determination, it recognises difference from the dominant economic and industrial culture as a political principle. 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.
The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law. This year's lecture was given by Prof Beth Simmons, University of Pennsylvania. 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
The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law. This year's lecture was given by Prof Beth Simmons, University of Pennsylvania. 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
The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law. This year's lecture was given by Prof Beth Simmons, University of Pennsylvania. 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
Lecture summary: This research examines international law’s longstanding entanglement with communications infrastructure. There is increasing concern regarding the rise of private global power in the form of global digital platforms and their model of information capitalism. This paper responds by focusing on historical connections between international law and infrastructure as a means of examining their relationship in the global communications context. This reveals a longer trajectory to current interest in information capitalism’s effects on international life. 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.
Lecture summary: In this talk, Lucas Lixinski examines the erasure of Indigenous perspectives from the literature on the turn to history in international law. Considering the turn to history’s promise to offer alternative imaginations by recovering history, it is somewhat surprising and disappointing that so much of this turn is narrated from the perspective of colonisers. Lixinski unpacks the implications of this turn to Indigenous agency and victimhood, and leverages alternative retellings of Indigenous peoples’ engagement with European international law that focus on Indigenous agency, diplomacy, and power. The talk fundamentally challenges what we take for granted in emancipatory international legal projects, and offers possibilities for rethinking how we do international legal history. 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.
Lecture summary: After the conclusion of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the entry into force of its Article 108, the subject of maritime crimes has experienced many important developments. Indeed, at present, States have to deal with criminal actions which did not exist in the classical International Law of the Sea. Relevant examples include kidnapping and hostage-taking at sea, maritime terrorism offences, the smuggling of migrants by sea, illicit oil and fuel illicit activities in the maritime domain and the maritime crime of illicit traffic in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances by sea. 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)
The LCIL and Cambridge International Law Journal (CILJ) are pleased to invite you to the LCIL-CILJ Annual Lecture 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.
Lecture summary: For better or for worse, the ‘English school’ or ‘British tradition’ of international law has eluded systematization or definition. The lecture pursues the argument that it is possible to identify clear synergies in the mainstream legal method of British international lawyers, focusing on British approaches to the doctrine of self-defence. It should not be surprising that this method follows in the common law tradition, displaying the tradition's three key hallmarks of (1) connection to social practice, (2) focus on courts and (3) an anti-theoretical tendency. Identity and analysis of these characteristics helps us to understand the distinctive contribution of British approaches to international law and the work this 'common law method' has done in strengthening and shaping international law. Identifying these characteristics is also important in order to understand the more problematic implications of their application in the international legal context. The common law method has consequences for the structure and direction of the international legal system, including the parameters of its community, the site of its authority and the role of theory in its development. Reflection on these strengths and weaknesses helps us better understand British contributions to international law. Paradoxically, the route to a more universal international law requires us first to understand the ways in which it is plural. 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!.
Lecture summary: The Energy Charter Treaty was concluded in 1994 on the assumption that fossil fuels could continue to be used for the foreseeable future. This article examines how ECT contracting parties can now withdraw from this treaty for climate change reasons without being subject to its 'sunset' clause, which protects existing investments for 20 years. It evaluates several strategies, including amendment and inter se agreements, and withdrawal on the basis of a fundamental change of circumstances (rebus sic stantibus). That fundamental change is not climate change itself, which was foreseen in 1994. It is the fact that, as recently stated by the IPCC, fossil fuels now need urgently to be abandoned, resulting in significant stranded assets. This was then unforeseen and radically transforms the extent of the ECT’s obligation to continue to protect existing fossil fuel investments for another 20 years. The article finally considers the implications of such a withdrawal for remaining contracting parties under Article 70 VCLT. 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.
Lecture Summary: This lecture will discuss recent developments in the UN Climate Regime, focusing in particular on the mismatch between the increasing emphasis on temperature goals and target-setting under the Paris Agreement and its treatment of equity and fairness in delivering these goals and targets. 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.
Lecture summary: Just over a year ago, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sought public comments on a bold and thoughtfully framed rule proposal for the enhancement and standardization of climate-related disclosure. It was a move that signaled to many that the US was finally responding to the global shift amongst investors and asset managers toward the integration of ESG data into fundamental value analysis. Today, however, as ESG issues in the US have become politically polarized and as litigation challenges loom large, the possibility of meaningful change appears more remote. 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.