Dr. Alessandra Spadaro of Utrecht University outlines several challenges to the applicability of the doctrine of superior responsibility in the context of the use of autonomous weapons systems.

Peter Quayle argues employment law of international organizations tends towards incoherence, however, mapping international administrative law onto a larger framework of international organizations law can realize a more workable version of the law.

Natalie Klein, Professor at UNSW Sydney, presents on the Geneva Declaration on Human Rights at Sea, adopted in March 2022 as an initiative of UK charity Human Rights at Sea, and on the Declaration's lawmaking potential. Natalie Klein, Professor at UNSW Sydney, presents on the Geneva Declaration on Human Rights at Sea, adopted in March 2022 as an initiative of UK charity Human Rights at Sea, and on the Declaration's lawmaking potential.

Dr Eliana Cusato, postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam Center for International Law, presents an overview of the key arguments in her book, 'The Ecology of War and Peace: Marginalising Slow and Structural Violence in International Law'.

Monica Feria-Tinta discusses a landmark 2022 decision of the UN Human Rights Committee which found that Australia failed to protect indigenous Torres Strait Islanders against adverse impacts of climate change, in breach of human rights law. Monica Feria-Tinta, is a barrister at Twenty Essex chambers

Dr Nikola Hajdin outlines an analytical framework for criminal complicity in a war of aggression Dr Nikola Hajdin argues against the dominant view that a perpetrator of the crime of aggression must be in a position effectively to exercise control over, or direct, the political or military action of a state, and outlines an analytical framework for criminal complicity in a war of aggression

Professor Karen Scott of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, gives a presentation exploring the current regime complex for ocean plastics and considering how the law of the sea is likely to interact with a newly proposed plastics treaty.

Professor Errol P. Mendes of the University of Ottawa gives a presentation calling for a revisiting of the origins of the concept of sovereignty in Public International Law.

Philippa Webb, Professor of Public International Law at King’s College London, gives a presentation on recent developments in English law in cases against current and former heads of state. Apologies that there was a brief technical issue shortly after the beginning of this recording.

Freya Baetens, Professor of Public International Law at Oslo University, gives a presentation on how the International Court of Justice has addressed claims based on ‘regional’ customary international law.

Nicolas Lamp, Queen’s University, Canada gives a presentation to the Public International Law Discussion Group.

Professor Anne van Aaken, University of Hamburg, Germany, gives a talk for the Public International Law seminar series (11/11/2021).

Professor Catharine Titi, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)-CERSA, University Paris II Panthéon-Assas, France, gives a talk for the Public International Law seminar series. (4/11/2021)

A presentation by Professor Stefan Talmon on Tactical Admissions in International Litigation, delivered to the Public International Law Discussion Group.

Professor Paul Gragl, European Law at the University of Graz, Austria, gives a talk for the Public International Law seminar series. Abstract: Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines are, in general, safe and effective, vaccine hesitancy continues to thrive due to various reasons, such as misinformation, the wish to protect one’s personal autonomy, and/or religious or moral beliefs. Vaccine hesitancy therefore endangers attaining and maintaining herd immunity which protects those that cannot be vaccinated due to medical reasons. Some States have consequently implemented compulsory vaccination schemes in order to close this gap in protecting public health, which, however, raises two essential questions in the context of human rights protection: (i) if a State has done so and implemented a compulsory vaccination scheme, does it potentially violate Articles 2,8, and 9 of the ECHR? In other words, are the ECHR Contracting Parties under a negative obligation to abstain from introducing such measures? Or (ii) if a State has not done so (yet), is it actually under a positive obligation to introduce such measures in order not to violate these provisions? On the basis of the ECtHR’s recent judgment in Vavřička and others v. the Czech Republic (April 2021), I will discuss these questions and conclude that States are, if specific requirements are met, not prohibited from implementing such measures, whilst they are also not obligated to do so under the ECHR as long as they protect those most vulnerable to infectious diseases through other means. The presentation is based on a paper which will be published in the European Convention on Human Rights Law Review. Paul Gragl is Professor of European Law at the University of Graz, Austria. His research interests include public international law, EU law, human rights law, and legal theory as well as philosophy, which is reflected in his most recent monograph Legal Monism: Law, Philosophy, and Politics (OUP, 2018).

Julia Emtseva, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg, Germany, gives a talk for the Public International Law seminar series. Julia Emtseva is a research fellow and a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg, Germany. Julia obtained her LL.M. in International Human Rights Law at the University of Notre Dame Law School, M.A. in Human Rights and Democratization in the Global Campus of Human Rights Regional Program in the Caucasus, and LL.B. at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA). Julia Emtseva obtained her qualification as a lawyer in Kyrgyzstan and before starting her PhD, she interned at different national courts, including the Constitutional Chamber of the Kyrgyz Republic, and worked as a teaching and research assistant at the law faculty of the AUCA, a human rights observer with the American Bar Association as well as in different NGOs, including the National Committee of the Red Cross in Kyiv and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin.

Professor Jutta Brunnée, University of Toronto, gives a talk for the seminar series on 6th May 2021. Drawing on the practice-turn in constructivism and in international relations (IR) theory more generally, I will argue that a particular approach to managing stability and change is inherent in, and indeed characteristic of, legality in international as in domestic law. The "interactional law" framework that I developed with Stephen Toope places particular emphasis on what we call the "practice of legality". This concept is central to understanding how law can both enable and constrain state actions, and why international law is a distinctive language of justification and contestation. In turn, the focus on stability and change is helpful because it directly confronts some of the persistent doubts and assumptions about international law, in particular in relation to international politics. Our work is animated by the intuition that the dominant views in IR and international law scholarship underestimate international law's capacity to mediate stability and change, in part because they focus on the surface of law (treaties, statutes and so on) and external factors (interests, enforcement). They neglect the deeper structure of what makes norms "law," and the distinctive practices that account for both its relative stability and its capacity for change. Jutta Brunnée is Dean, University Professor and James Marshall Tory Dean’s Chair, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of Public International Law, International Environmental Law and International Legal Theory. She has published extensively in each of these areas. Her current research agenda explores the role of international legality and legal practices in mediating between stability and change in international law. Dean Brunnée is co-author of International Climate Change Law (OUP 2017), which was awarded the American Society of International Law’s 2018 Certificate of Merit “in a specialized area of international law” and was recently translated into Korean, and of Legitimacy and Legality in International Law: An Interactional Account (CUP 2010), which was awarded the American Society of International Law’s 2011 Certificate of Merit “for preeminent contribution to creative scholarship.” She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2013, and Associate of the Institut de Droit International in 2017. In 2019, she delivered a course on “Procedure and Substance in International Environmental Law” at The Hague Academy of International Law, published in the Academy's Collected Courses / Recueil des Cours series (2020). In 2020, Dean Brunnée was appointed University Professor, the University of Toronto’s highest and most distinguished academic rank.

Dr Lea Raible University of Glasgow; 2020/21 re:constitution Fellow, gives a talk for the Public International Law discussion group on 20th May 2021.

Ignacio de Casas, Austral University, Argentina, gives a seminar for the PIL discussion group. The terms ‘international human rights standards’ or ‘inter-American human rights standards’ are often used by the Inter-American human rights bodies as almost a synonym for human rights or the obligations that States have in this area. In their discourse, these ‘standards’ are usually considered not to refer solely to the normative expression of human rights in treaties, custom or general principles of law. On the contrary, such expression is given a use that also includes non-binding instruments whose normative (legal) content is doubtful or, at least, its bindingness is not expressly declared or recognized by any international rule (e.g., declarations, resolutions of international organizations, judicial decisions, views and general comments of treaty bodies, case law of the Commission, etc.). In recent years, the Inter-American Commission in particular has produced many thematic reports of so called ‘Inter-American standards’, which are compendia of the jurisprudence of the Court and the Commission. They contain no clear definition of the concept of standards. Yet, inadvertently or boldly, they are invoked as a rule of conduct (source of obligations) for States, even when their content has clearly not been determined by, or based on, the traditional sources of international law. It is possible that this term is used as a performative utterance, pursuing a specific ideological intentionality with the meaning attributed (i.e., a progressive case for human rights). Is the jurisprudence of both the Inter-American Commission and Court a source of international law? Have they attributed themselves a law-making power? C. Ignacio de Casas is an adjunct professor at Austral University in Argentina, where he also coordinates the Graduate Diploma in Human Rights Law. Prior to that, he worked for a law firm focussing on human rights international litigation. He has an Abogado degree from the University of Mendoza, a masters from the University of Oxford and is a PhD candidate at Austral University. He is also co-founder of the Centro Latinoamericano de Derechos Humanos (CLADH).

Professor David Dyzenhaus, University of Toronto, currently a Guggenheim Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls, gives a talk for the Public International Law seminar series. In the recent resurgence of jurisprudential interest in international law, HLA Hart’s theory of law occupies centre stage and doctrinal public international lawyers usually adopt his theoretical vocabulary, in particular his account of the rule of recognition, when they feel the need for some theoretical tools. This is a puzzle because Hart saw philosophy of public international law as peripheral to the main task of jurisprudence—to analyze the ‘distinctive structure of a municipal legal system’—and deemed its study ‘only a relatively small and unimportant part of the most famous and controversial theories of law’. In addition, his own analysis of public international law is widely considered problematic. But while Hart is thought not to have been quite on his game when it came to public international law, it may seem that his is the only game in town when it comes to the place of such law in a general theory of law. I argue that it high time that jurisprudence returned to Kelsen, unhindered by Hart’s distortion of Kelsen’s central ideas, not least because Kelsenian legal theory shows us the benefits of reversing the order of argument about public international law. Instead of, first, constructing a theory of the law of a national legal order and, second, asking whether public international law is law in its light, we should see that understanding the legality of international law illuminates how philosophy of law might productively address some of its central problems. I examine these issues through the lens of the debate about whether the relationship between public international law and national law should be understood as ‘monists’ or as ‘dualists’ urge. David Dyzenhaus is a University Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, currently a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting fellow at All Souls. He has just completed The Long Arc of Legality: Hobbes, Kelsen, Hart (Cambridge, forthcoming).

Professor James T. Gathii, Wing-Tat Lee Chair in International Law and Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, gives a talk for the Oxford Public International Law seminar series. This talk will present the findings of an empirical study that sought to establish two primary data points. First, the nationalities of the lawyers who argued cases before the International Court of Justice between 1998 and 2019. Second, the share of time lawyers from different countries had audience before the Court. The assumption underlying this study was that the more diverse the set of nationals who appear before the Court, the more international it is and vice versa. To find out the share of time lawyers from different countries had audience before the Court, the lawyers were divided into two groups. Those with the nationality of member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, (OECD), were categorized as originating in or based in Western States. Those with non-OECD nationality were designated as originating or based in non-Western States. After presenting the findings of the empirical study, the talk will advance several hypothesis to account for the results. 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. He is a graduate of the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and Harvard Law School. He sits on the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of African Law and the Journal of International Trade Law and Policy, among others. He is co-editor in Chief of the African Journal of International Economic Law. He was the Grotius Lecturer at the 2020 American Society of International Law Virtual Annual Meeting. His research and teaching interests are in Public International Law, International Trade Law, Third World Approaches to International Law, (TWAIL), Comparative Constitutional Law and Human Rights. Professor Gathii served an Independent Expert of the Working Group on Extractive Industries, Environment, and Human Rights Violations in Africa formed by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights between 2012 to 2020. He is also an expert member of the Working Group on Agricultural Land Investment Contracts of the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law, (UNIDRIOT), the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the International Fund for Agriculture (IFAD). He has sat as an arbitrator in two international commercial arbitrations hosted by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague. He is a founding member of the TWAIL network. He is an elected member of the International Academy of International Law. He has consulted for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, (OHCHR), and the Economic Commission for Africa, (ECA), among others. Professor Gathii is a founding Editor of Afronomicslaw.org, the blog on international economic law issues relating to Africa and Global South. His books include African Regional Trade Agreements as Legal Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 2011, Paperback 2013); War, Commerce and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2010); and The Contested Empowerment of Kenya’s Judiciary, 2010-2015: A Historical Institutional Analysis, (Sheria Publishing House, 2016). His latest edited book is The Performance of Africa’s International Courts: Using Litigation for Political, Legal, and Social Change, (Oxford University Press in 2020). In addition to his books, Professor Gathii has authored over 90 articles and book chapters. __ The PIL Discussion Group hosts a weekly speaker event and is a key focal point for PIL@Oxford. Due to the current public health emergency, the PIL Discussion Group series will be held remotely for Hilary 2021. Speakers include distinguished international law practitioners, academics, and legal advisers from around the world. Topics involve contemporary and challenging issues in international law.

Professor Pablo Kalmanovitz, International Studies Division at CIDE, Mexico City, gives a talk for the Oxford PIL discussion group. The Law of Armed Conflict is usually understood to be a regime of exception that applies only during armed conflict and regulates hostilities among enemies. It assigns privileges to states far beyond what they are allowed to do in peacetime, and it mandates certain protections for non-combatants, which can often be defeated by appeals to military necessity or advantage. The Laws of War in International Thought examines the intellectual history of the laws of war before their codification. It reconstructs the processes by which political and legal theorists built the laws’ distinctive vocabularies and legitimized some of their widest permissions, and it situates these processes within the broader intellectual project that from early modernity spelled out the nature, function, and powers of state sovereignty. The book focuses on four historical moments in the intellectual history of the laws of war: the doctrine of just war in Spanish scholasticism; Hugo Grotius’s theory of solemn war; the Enlightenment theory of regular war; and late nineteenth-century humanitarianism. By looking at these moments, it is shown how challenging and polemical it has been for international theorists to justify the exceptional and permissive character of the laws of war. Pablo Kalmanovitz is research professor and head of the International Studies Division at CIDE (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas) in Mexico City. 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. ___ The PIL Discussion Group hosts a weekly speaker event and is a key focal point for PIL@Oxford. Due to the current public health emergency, the PIL Discussion Group series will be held remotely for Hilary 2021. Speakers include distinguished international law practitioners, academics, and legal advisers from around the world. Topics involve contemporary and challenging issues in international law.

Professor Seline Trevisanut, Utrecht University, gives a talk for the Public International Law discussion group series. On 27 January 2021, the UN Human Rights Committee ascertained the responsibility of Italy for failing to protect the right to life of more than 200 migrants who were on board a vessel that sank in the Mediterranean Sea in 2013. The HR Committee adopted a clear functional approach to jurisdiction based on the ‘special relationship of dependency’ between the individuals on a vessel in distress and the SAR state(s). This decision was also met with criticism by some members of the HR Committee who clearly dissented with this functional approach and considered that the adopted functional approach ‘might disrupt the legal order which the SOLAS and the SAR Conventions attempted to introduce.’ The present talk will dissect the reasoning of the HR Committee in light of the SOLAS and SAR Conventions in order to highlight the law of the sea underpinnings of a functional approach to jurisdiction. It will also emphasize how the recognition of a right to be rescued at sea strengthens the legal order created by the SOLAS and SAR Conventions. Seline Trevisanut (PhD, University of Milan; MA, Paris I-Panthéon Sorbonne) is Professor of International Law and Sustainability at Utrecht University since 2018. Before joining Utrecht in 2012 as Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow, she taught and conducted research in various institutions, including Columbia University, the European University Institute, and UC Berkeley. Seline is a member of the Scientific Council of the Institut du droit économique de la mer and several editorial boards. Her publications include a monograph on Irregular migration by sea in international and EU law (Jovene 2012, in Italian), and edited volumes, inter alia, on Migration in the Mediterranean: Mechanism of International Cooperation (CUP 2015) and Regime Interaction in Ocean Governance: Problems, theories and methods (Brill 2020).

Professor Monica Hakimi, University of Michigan, gives a talk for the PIL discussion series. When we speak of the rule of law, we generally mean to describe the attributes that make law, as an enterprise, worthwhile--the qualities that lead us to aspire to live in a society governed by law. Though international lawyers commonly invoke the concept, we have devoted little attention to explaining what it entails or how it translates to the international plane. This lecture will begin to fill that gap by presenting two distinct visions of the international rule of law. Each vision captures something important about law, but they are in certain respects incompatible. And while one already informs much of the thinking on international law, the second, which has largely been overlooked, might provide a more suitable framework for evaluating when and why international law is worthwhile. 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 focuses on how international law operates and adapts to contemporary challenges, particularly in the contexts of national and human security.

Professor Martin Scheinin, Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, gives a talk for the Public International Law series. On 13 November 2020, the European Court of Human Rights communicated to 33 governments an application by a group of young Portuguese persons who claim that conduct by the respondent States in respect of the phenomenon and human rights impact of climate change amounts to violations of ECHR Articles 2 and 8, also in conjunction with Article 14. Notably, when communicating the case of Duarte Agostinho and Others to Member States, the Court added Article 3 in the list. The case belongs to a wider trend of efforts to take issues of climate change to human rights fora, and it raises complex issues concerning the interaction between human rights law, climate change law, international environmental law and public international law. There are two interrelated reasons for being open but critical in respect of the prospects of success in climate change cases brought before human rights courts or treaty bodies: (1) Some of the litigation may be ‘strategic’ in the sense that the cases are about the use of human rights for the purpose of climate change litigation. What the initiators want in those cases primarily is a pronouncement, as a remedy for a human rights treaty violation established, of a government’s obligation radically to reduce its emissions and thereby contribute to the turning of the tide of global warming. (2) In preparing such cases, insufficient thought may have been put into framing the claims for purposes of human rights adjudication, including in respect of (a) the admissibility condition of the victim requirement and (b) the issue of jurisdiction, closely linked to the notion of attribution. The questions posed by the European Court of Human Rights to the respondent governments in Duarte Agostinho suggest that these issues will have a prominent place in the proceedings that will soon follow. We can expect governments arguing that they, sitting perhaps 2000 kilometres away from Portugal in a country of free markets and free enterprise, have no concrete obligations in respect of, and no concrete impact upon, how a 1.5 oC rise in global temperatures would affect the lives and human rights of youths in Portugal. Without wanting to put into question the genuine interest by the ECtHR to address the impact of climate change in respect of substantive human rights, or the prospects of the case of Duarte Agostinho to pass the hurdles of preliminary objections and admissibility, there is a clear need for exploring ways of framing a human rights case so as to avoid being trapped in issues of victim status and jurisdiction. A case to keep an eye on is Billy et al. v. Australia, a complaint by a group of indigenous Torres Strait Islanders, pending before the UN Human Rights Committee. According to a pre-submission press release, the case is about “the threat to their culture and their ability to live on their home islands”. There has also been some informative press coverage, as well as utilization of a new procedure for submitting amicus curiae briefs to the Committee. Billy is a possible game changer in climate change litigation, as it represents a potential of moving past the hurdles of victimhood and jurisdiction. This is because of the prominent place the notion of ‘culture’ has in the case and more broadly in indigenous peoples’ human rights claims. Culture is by definition intergenerational. Therefore, the right to transmit a culture belongs to the essence of the human right to enjoy one’s culture in community with other members of the group (ICCPR Article 27). This right to transmission is a right that belongs both to one or two living generations of today who seek to transmit, and to one or two generations of living individuals who are the recipients of that transmission. Where the right to transmit is frustrated and rendered meaningless –- or ‘denied’ in the language of Article 27 ICCPR -- we have ‘victims’. The enjoyment of a culture is also local, usually tied to the particular natural resources and conditions of a place or area. Culture is wide in scope, including traditional or otherwise typical means of livelihood, often collective and intergenerational in nature. It also includes a living language that is learned, used and developed in the context of a community engaging with its culture, including in its intergenerational transmission. And culture is about a way of life, wellbeing and identity. In respect of the territorial State at least, we hence have ‘jurisdiction’. (The issue of attribution in respect of other States would, however, remain.) The elaboration of a line of argument for indigenous peoples’ climate change litigation that is based on the intergenerational dimension of the right to culture also has heuristic value beyond the context where it is developed. This is because there is an intergenerational dimension also in general human rights such as Article 8 ECHR and Articles 17 and 23 ICCPR. This has been properly addressed and acknowledged in the Human Rights Committee case of Hopu and Bessert v. France where the Committee decided to treat as a valid reservation the declaration by France of the inapplicability of the minority rights clause in Article 27 but then turned to other, general, provisions of the ICCPR. A fresh reading of the ECtHR case of López Ostra v. Spain suggests that the intergenerational nature of ECHR Article 8 could have had a prominent role in that case. Litigation concerning carefully selected and articulated indigenous peoples’ claims concerning the tangible impact of climate change upon their ability to pass on to new generations their culture, way of life, traditional means of livelihood and identity may during this decade spearhead climate-change-related human rights litigation. But once that line of argument has been established and it has produced some result, also members of non-indigenous or non-minority communities can build the same line of argument under Articles 8 and 14 of the ECHR and Articles 17, 23 and 26 of the ICCPR. Professor Martin Scheinin is a British Academy Global Professor at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. His four-year project addresses a range of challenges to international human rights law posed by developments in the digital realm. Throughout his career, Professor Scheinin has engaged with human rights practice, including by serving eight years as member of the Human Rights Committee, the expert body monitoring States’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. For six years he was the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism. He retains an interest in human rights adjudication, first and foremost in issues of indigenous peoples’ rights.

Professor Nehal Bhuta, University of Edinburgh and Dr Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi, University of Amsterdam, give a talk for the Public International Law seminar series. Philip Alston’s deep worries about the institutionalization of the tactic of targeting killing, the ensuing extension of warfare and its corrosive consequences for any meaningful possibility of scrutinizing the legality of such strikes, proved far-sighted. The chapter focuses on the accompanying re-articulation of the right of self-defense by states active in the war on terror and demonstrate that it has fashioned a set of interconnected legal propositions that we call “revisionist.” This revisionist framework, we show, cumulatively engenders a highly permissive framework for the preventive, extraterritorial, use of lethal force against individuals and non-state groups, with a geographically and temporally expansive scope. We do not argue that this permissive version of self-defence is now lex lata or even de lege ferenda. We also distinguish ourselves from the view that the revisionist framework departs from “the ‘old days’ when the law was allegedly certain” – that is, when the law required a high threshold of effective control by the territorial state over the non-state armed group. Instead, building on Robert Brandom’s Hegelian account of the determinateness of legal concepts, we frame the revisionist framework as a historically-embedded process of determination of the new content of the concept of self-defense. The chapter shows that these conceptual revisions bring with them a reconfiguration of the structure of legal relationships presupposed by the jus ad bellum’s concept of proportionality, and a new (in)determinacy which renders the concept more permissive than constraining. 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. Dr Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Asser Institute (University of Amsterdam), a Teaching fellow at SciencesPo Paris and the Managing Editor of the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law. She holds a PhD in Law from the EUI, entitled “Drone Programs: the Interaction Between Technology, War and the Law”. She currently supervises Master theses in criminal law and public international law at the University of Amsterdam. Her work reflects on how new technologies, together with the law, reshape security practices in the counterterrorism context.

Carola Lingaas, VID Specialised University, gives a talk for the Public International Law seminar series. Members of racial groups are protected under international law against genocide, persecution, and apartheid. But what is race – and why was this contentious term not discussed when drafting the Statute of the International Criminal Court? Although the law uses this term, is it legitimate to talk about race today, let alone convict anyone for committing a crime against a racial group? Who are members of a racial group and how broadly can (and should) the term be interpreted? Can international criminal lawyers draw on human rights law in the interpretation of race - or does the prohibition of analogy and the principle of strict legality bar such application? These and other questions inform the presentation. The talk builds on the book The Concept of Race in International Criminal Law, which is the first comprehensive study of the concept of race in international criminal law. It explores the theoretical underpinnings for the crimes of genocide, apartheid, and persecution, and analyses all the relevant legal instruments, case law, and scholarship. It exposes how the international criminal tribunals have largely circumvented the topic of race, and how incoherent jurisprudence has resulted in inconsistent protection. By subjecting the problematic concept of 'race' to a multifaceted and interdisciplinary analysis, new interpretations are offered. The study argues that race in international criminal law should be constructed according to the perpetrator's perception of the victims’ ostensible racial otherness. The perpetrator’s imagination as manifested through his behaviour defines the victims’ racial group membership. The conclusions of the study are extrapolated on related cases such as the discrimination of the Sámi indigenous population of Norway. Carola Lingaas is an Associate Professor of Law, Faculty of Social Sciences, VID Specialized University (Oslo, Norway). She holds a PhD in international criminal law from the University of Oslo. Her dissertation on The Concept of Race in International Criminal Law was published as monograph by Routledge. She has published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, essays, research reports, and blog posts within the areas of international criminal law, human rights law, migration, and trafficking. Current research projects address hate speech against migrants and the Sámi indigenous population, dehumanizing speech as means to construct the genocidal intent, the relationship of religion and law in the crime of genocide, and the influence of politics on the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. Common to most projects is the interpretation of the law in drawing on social science research as well as the focus on matters of identity (e.g. group identities, identity creations, othering, identity fault lines). Carola Lingaas teaches domestic Norwegian welfare law, child protection law, legal method, and human rights law. She is the book review editor of the Nordic Journal of Human Rights and co-editor of an anthology and a special issue. Prior to joining academia, she worked as legal clerk for the District Court and the Office of the Public Prosecutor of Zürich (Switzerland). She then joined the International Committee of the Red Cross as a field delegate in South Sudan during the Second Civil War. She remained with the Red Cross for more than seven years, first the ICRC, later the Norwegian and Oslo Red Cross. She holds an LLM in public international law from the University of Oslo and a master’s degree in law from the University of Zürich.

Luíza Leão Soares Pereira, Lecturer in International Law at the University of Sheffield, and Doctoral Candidate at the University of Cambridge, gives a talk for the Public International Law seminar series. This presentation narrates my experience using obituaries[1] of international lawyers to gain better insights into the international legal profession. My research looks at these unusual sources through three different methodological lenses – quantitative, doctrinal, and critical (broadly construed). Looking at the profession through different lenses yields a richer picture of the same object. Looked at through a quantitative lens, using Social Network Analysis, obituaries unveil professional and personal connections between international lawyers, shared career paths, and avenues whereby ideas may move, beyond single institutions or individual anecdotes.[2] Quantitative methods used in this way also help substantiate critiques about the lack in diversity in the high echelons of the profession. Through a doctrinal and qualitative lens, reading obituaries reveals how individuals have shaped the law in singular stances. Collating these examples shows a pattern that challenges traditional narratives in sources literature that discount the role of individuals in international lawmaking. Through a critical lens, the playful use of obituaries connects us to ‘the inner lives of the people who become international lawyers’[3], reigniting our passion for the discipline, and our belief in the ability to ‘enable us to encounter ambivalence’[4] and practice international law in a way that is ‘enlivening, productive and critically transformative’.[5] Broader lessons about the importance of methodological openness also underpin this exercise. Luíza Leão Soares Pereira is a Lecturer in International Law at the University of Sheffield, and Doctoral Candidate at the University of Cambridge, both in the UK. Her research focuses on the role of individual members of the international legal profession in the making of international law, using an eclectic methodology. Previously, she undertook her LLB at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), and an LLM at the University of Cambridge, where she received the Clive Parry (Overseas) Prize for International Law. She was an intern at the Office of the Prosecutor in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (Radovan Karadzic Case), and a Pegasus Trust Scholar at Inner Temple. Footnotes [1] More specifically, the obituaries published since 1920 in the British Yearbook of International Law. [2] Luiza Leao Soares Pereira and Niccolò Ridi, ‘Mapping the “Invisible College of International Lawyers” through Obituaries’ Leiden Journal of International Law (Forthcoming). [3] Isobel Roele, ‘The Making of International Lawyers: Winnicott’s Transitional Objects’ in Jessie Hohmann and Daniel Joyce (eds), International Law’s Objects (OUP 2018) 73. [4] Isobel Roele, ‘Policing Critique’ (2018) 81 701, 721. [5] Anne Orford, ‘International Law and the Limits of History’, The Law of International Lawyers: Reading Martti Koskenniemi (Forthcoming) (2015) 8.

Professor Duncan Hollis, Temple University, gives a talk for the Public International Law seminar series on 21st January 2021. Abstract: On 7 August 2020, the Inter-American Juridical Committee of the Organization of American States (OAS) adopted its Guidelines on Binding and Non-Binding Agreements. The project found its impetus in the rising number of non-traditional international agreements, including both non-binding agreements among States as well as binding and non-binding agreements concluded by government ministries and sub-national territorial units. Drafted over four years under the Rapporteurship of Professor Duncan B. Hollis (with input from Member States and other stakeholders) the guidelines and accompanying commentary address: (i) definitions for each of the various forms of international agreement, including treaties, political commitments, contracts, and inter-institutional agreements; (ii) the capacity of different State institutions to conclude different forms of international agreement; (iii) the methods of identification employed in international practice to identify agreements by type; (iv) the procedures States use to authorize and publicize their various forms of international agreements; (v) the different legal effects, if any, that State practice suggests follows the conclusion of treaties, political commitments, contracts; and (vi) training and other educational efforts to improve transparency in States’ law and practice with respect to both binding and non-binding agreements. Translated by the OAS into four languages, the Guidelines and their accompanying Commentary provide a set of voluntary understandings and practices that States and other stakeholders may employ to improve knowledge on international agreements and, in doing so, reduce the risk of future inter-State and inter-institutional difficulties and disagreements. Bio: Duncan B. Hollis is editor of the award-winning Oxford Guide to Treaties (2012, 2nd ed., 2020), International Law (7th ed., 2018, with Allen Weiner), and Defending Democracies: Combating Foreign Election Interference in a Digital Age (forthcoming 2021, with Jens Ohlin). He teaches in the areas of public international law and cybersecurity, which are also at the center of his research agenda. Professor Hollis is a Non-Resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a strategic consultant for the Microsoft Corporation’s Digital Peace Team. From 2016-2020, Professor Hollis served as an elected member of one of the Organization of American States’ principal organs -- the Inter-American Juridical Committee. There, he has served as Rapporteur for projects producing guidelines on binding and non-binding agreements as well as improving the transparency of how States understand international law applies in cyberspace. He is also the principal investigator for a grant from the Hewlett Foundation to offer a “boot camp” on technical issues in cybersecurity for non-technical experts. Most recently, Professor Hollis’s research led him to co-organize The Oxford Process on International Law Protections in Cyberspace, a process housed at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict that, to date, has produced three widely publicized statements on international law protections for healthcare, vaccine research, and elections.

Humanitarian personnel from time to time find themselves transporting desperate civilian residents forced out of besieged areas into long-term or even permanent displacement Humanitarian personnel from time to time find themselves transporting desperate civilian residents forced out of besieged areas into long-term or even permanent displacement, although such removal is absolutely forbidden under the law of armed conflict (LOAC). Killing enemy combatants using lethal autonomous weapons may feel deeply offensive to humanity, yet it arguably remains in compliance with today’s LOAC. When faced with dilemmas such as these, what is an ethically sensitive and law-abiding actor to do? Can the law itself resolve them? In his new book, Military Necessity: The Art, Morality and Law of War, Nobuo Hayashi develops two hypotheses regarding how concerns for humanity may override LOAC rules. In one, even if LOAC’s black-letter rules prohibit particular action, its compliance with what humanity demands may restore its lawfulness. Hayashi calls this hypothesis “Humantätsgebot geht vor kriegsmanier”, or “Humantätsgebot” for short. In the other hypothesis, doing what humanity condemns is sufficient to impair its conformity with LOAC’s black-letter rules and to render it unlawful as a result. He calls this latter hypothesis “counter-Humantätsgebot”. An example of the first hypothesis can be seen in Article 118 of Geneva Convention III (1949) that unqualifiedly obligates states to release and repatriate all prisoners of war (POWs) in their custody without delay. And yet, already during the Korean War, states declined to repatriate POWs against their own will. Towards the end phase of the Falkland-Malvinas conflict, the British kept their Argentine POWs in detention aboard naval vessels at sea on urgent humanitarian grounds, despite Article 22 of Geneva Convention III according to which POWs “may be interned only in premises located on land”. If we were to justify such behaviour, would we not have any choice but to do so by accepting Humantätsgebot? An example of the counter-Humanitätsgebot hypothesis is how in 1991, Iraqi forces retreating en masse from Kuwait via desert highways were intercepted by Coalition forces and decimated under relentless artillery and machinegun fire. The so-called “capture rather than kill” debate highlights LOAC’s ambiguity where one has the option to capture, wound or kill one’s enemy. It is asserted with a growing frequency that killing rather than capturing enemy soldiers should be deemed a breach of LOAC where they were susceptible to both modes of disablement. A hint of counter-Humantätsgebot is inescapable here, in so far as it is arguable that today’s LOAC does not obligate the belligerent to employ the least injurious mode of disablement available. Hayashi will test the viability of these two hypotheses by re-imagining LOAC as a system of inclusive legal positivism. In one version of inclusive positivism, a legal system’s rule of recognition requires a would-be norm to be compatible with public morals (“necessity thesis”). To the extent LOAC’s rule of recognition espouses the necessity thesis, we can say that Humanitätsgebot is true. In another version of inclusive positivism, a rule of recognition validates public morals as law, whatever existing legal provisions have to say on the issue at hand (“sufficiency thesis”). Whether counter-Humanitätsgebot is true depends on the extent to which LOAC’s rule of recognition exhibits the sufficiency thesis. Nobuo Hayashi is an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Centre for International and Operational Law, Swedish Defence University. He also holds visiting professorships at the UN-mandated University for Peace (San José, Costa Rica) and the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (Turin, Italy). Hayashi specialises in international humanitarian law, international criminal law, jus ad bellum and international weapons law. He has twenty years of experience performing advanced research, providing expert advice, teaching postgraduate students and training senior professionals in these areas. Hayashi’s work has been cited in international war crimes trials and diplomatic negotiations. His latest monograph, Military Necessity: The Art, Morality and Law of War, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Major positions held: Senior Legal Advisor, International Law and Policy Institute (Oslo, Norway); Visiting Professor, International University of Japan; Researcher, Peace Research Institute Oslo; and Legal officer, Office of the Prosecutor, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Degrees earned: Ph.D. (Leiden), LL.M. (Cantab.), DÉS (Graduate Institute), BSFS (Georgetown).

Public international law’s turn to judicialisation in the last three decades has led to more attention paid to remedies including of monetary character, in inter-State dispute settlement as well as in tribunals open to non-State actors. In the last five years or so, a more discreet phenomenon of successful 1+ billion USD claims has emerged. I will address it under the rubric of ‘mega-awards’, in line with the terminology reportedly used by States in the UNCITRAL Working Group III meeting this October. A few recent examples from different international tribunals will illustrate my point. Last September, Albania allocated 1.2 billion EUR for execution of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. This July, an investor-State dispute settlement tribunal rendered a 6 billion USD award against Pakistan, the second mega-award against the particular respondent since 2017. In the International Court of Justice, it seems likely that the claim for compensation in Armed Activities on the Territory of Congo (DRC v Uganda), which was scheduled to be argued in the week of 18 November (now postponed), could involve comparable amounts, in light of the Court’s findings on the merits. In short, mega-awards are, if not quite mundane, certainly not exceptional in contemporary international law, generated in different fields of international law as part of general dispute settlement practice and with very significant effects on many respondent States. I propose to discuss their place in the framework of rules and institutions of international law, with an eye to whether it is helpful to treat them as a separate juridical category that calls for particularly attuned legal solutions. Dr Martins Paparinskis is Reader in Public International Law at UCL Laws. He is a generalist international lawyer with a particular interest in international dispute settlement, State responsibility, and international investment law. Martins’ publications include a monograph with OUP, articles with British Year Book of International Law and European Journal of International Law, and a co-authored chapter on State responsibility in the forthcoming 10th edition of OUP’s Oppenheim: Peace. Martins is the book review editor of Journal of World Investment and Trade, a co-editor of Current Legal Problems, and a member of the editorial board of UCL Press. His appointments include ICSID Panel of Arbitrators, Permanent Court of Arbitration, management board of the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, implementation committee of the UNECE Water Convention, and the OSCE Court of Conciliation and Arbitration.

International law ascribes to the conferral of a jus cogens status on a norm a particular legal significance. Bluntly put, jus cogens norms have legal consequences that norms of ordinary international law do not. International lawyers have a great many different ideas of what these legal consequences are more precisely. As of yet, the reason for this divide has not been fully clarified. This void tends to confuse jus cogens discourse on several issues such as the immunity of states and state officials in judicial proceedings originating in the violation of jus cogens norms, or the extradition of alleged perpetrators of international crimes, or again the non-applicability of amnesty law concerning such crimes. It also impedes the justification of judicial and other legal decisions. As this article argues, contrary to the general assumption, a lawyer’s conception of the legal consequences of jus cogens is not value-neutral but dependent on his or her preferred understanding of the concept of law. The argument goes briefly as follows: (1) What causes international lawyers to disagree is the issue of whether or not jus cogens norms entail obligations concerned with their own enforcement. (2) This is essentially an issue concerning the individuation of norms. (3) Depending on whether a lawyer takes the position of a legal positivist or a legal idealist, he or she uses different criteria for the individuation of jus cogens norms. (4) And this is why, for legal idealists, jus cogens norms entail obligations concerned with their own enforcement, whereas for legal positivists they do not. Ulf Linderfalk is Professor of International Law in the Faculty of Law, Lund University, which he joined in 2001. He is a general international lawyer, who takes a special interest in questions relating to international legal structure. His research has examined issues arising from phenomena such as normative conflict, legal hierarchy, treaty interpretation, the identity of special regimes, cross-fertilisation among such regimes, legal principles, legal discretion, balancing, and conceptual terms. He is the author of four monographs – including the recent ‘Understanding Jus Cogens in International Law and International Legal Discourse’ (Edward Elgar, 2020) – two textbooks (both of which are available in updated second editions); four co-edited volumes; and a total of some 30-40 articles in high-ranking peer-reviewed international law journals.

Domestic and international judges speak separately from their courts' institutional voice in myriad ways. Instances of separate judicial speech range from written and oral dissents, to posing questions from the bench, to an array of extrajudicial activities, such as media appearances and penning memoirs. In domestic systems such as the United States, despite long-standing concerns that individual speech by judges will undermine the corporate vision of a court and erode 'the cult of the robe,' many now view separate judicial speech as serving a valuable function by contributing to the judiciary’s authority and legitimacy. Yet, while legal scholars have devoted considerable attention to the practice of separate opinion writing, they often ignore differences in types of concurrences or dissents, and largely gloss over the other ways in which judges speak separately on and off the bench. International legal scholars similarly focus on separate written opinions to the exclusion of the broader array of individual judicial speech, behavior, and practices. This talk interrogates the formal and informal ways in which judges make their voices heard and offers an interdisciplinary typology of separate judicial speech, suggesting that it falls along five dimensions of variance that transcend the domestic/international law divide. It argues that different forms of separate speech reveal markedly different understandings of the role judges do and should play within society. It concludes by considering the normative stakes involved in judges speaking separately and the implications for courts in an era of backlash against international institutions and growing challenges to the rule of law. Neha Jain is Professor of Public International Law at the European University Institute. She is also Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law (on special leave). Her scholarship focuses on public international law, criminal law, and comparative law. Prior to joining Minnesota, she was a law research fellow at Georgetown University Law Center and worked at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg. Jain has held fellowships at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for International Courts, and the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. She has also served as a visiting professional in the Chambers Division of the International Criminal Court and is a Board member of the European Society of International Law. Jain is the author of Perpetrators and Accessories in International Criminal Law (Hart, 2014) and her work has appeared in numerous journals, including the American Journal of International Law, European Journal of International Law, and Harvard International Law Journal.

From the instant that a State receives an early warning that mass atrocities are likely to occur, what, precisely, is it required to do in response? There is wide agreement that a duty to prevent atrocity crimes exists as a matter of both treaty and customary international law, but little agreement as to the specific content of the obligation. This need has become particularly acute as States hesitate to sign up for new multilateral treaties containing preventive provisions, and courts hesitate to enforce existing preventive duties. The obscurity surrounding preventive obligations is further complicated by the complex legal framework governing atrocity crimes, and the fact that the duty to prevent genocide, crimes against and humanity and war crimes each holds a separate status under the law, derived from distinct sources and the product of unique legal histories. In light of the fact that the precise nature of a crime is often not apparent until the bloodshed has begun, how are States meant to operationalize their responsibilities from the moment that risk appears? This talk will examine States' preventive obligations in relation to genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, by first reviewing the legal frameworks governing each atrocity crime, and then assessing the areas in which further clarity is needed. It will seek to articulate further procedural and substantive guidance as to the specific content of the duty to prevent from the moment that early warnings are provided, particularly in view of the International Court of Justice’s recent Provisional Measures decision in the case between The Gambia and Myanmar. Finally, it will conclude by proposing to derive a procedural obligation from the duty to prevent, imported from other areas of public international law, which would assist in filling some of the key operational voids in implementing State responsibility before atrocities have begun. Shannon Raj Singh is a Visiting Fellow of Practice at Oxford with the Blavatnik School of Government's Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC) Programme on International Peace and Security. She is also an Associate Legal Officer at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, where she advises the Appeals Chamber and the Office of the President on the first terrorism trial before an international criminal tribunal. At ELAC, Shannon is researching the prevention of mass atrocities with Federica D'Alessandra, Executive Director of the Oxford Programme on International Peace and Security. Together, they are working to articulate the preventive duties of States in relation to genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and to provide substantive guidance as to implementing and operationalizing the due diligence standard. The research is intended to be part of a stream of work to guide policymakers working in the atrocity prevention and accountability space. Shannon is also an advisor to the Transatlantic Network on Atrocity Prevention, an action-oriented network for engagement across governments, multilateral institutions, academia, and practitioners. Shannon is an American attorney licensed to practice in California, and a graduate of UCLA and the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law. She is also an Officer for the War Crimes Committee of the International Bar Association, and its Special Rapporteur on the ILC Draft Articles on Crimes Against Humanity. She has spoken on expert panels around the world on international criminal law, atrocity prevention, and the intersection of technology and human rights.

The concept of maritime security and its interplay with the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. This talk will focus on the meaning of maritime security in the literature and state practice and explore its relationship with LOSC. It will argue that maritime security is not simply a concept that needs defining but a blend of threats and activities by state and non-state actors. This will invite consideration of whether LOSC can help or hinder the efforts of states to address this emerging blend of threats and activities at sea. To evaluate this point, the conduct of maritime law enforcement operations by states as well as the development of maritime domain awareness and information-sharing practices will be discussed. It will be explained that LOSC cannot offer a solution to all maritime security threats, and thus states have turned to new tools and agreements to strengthen the security of the oceans, which represents a paradigm shift in the international law of the sea. Dr Sofia Galani (LLB, LLM, PhD, FHEA) is Lecturer in Law at the University of Bristol. Her research interests lie in the field of the international law of the sea, maritime security, human rights law and terrorism studies. She is a co-editor of the collection on Maritime Security and the Law of the Sea: Help or Hindrance? (with Sir Malcolm Evans, Edward Elgar, 2020). Her monograph entitled Hostages and Human Rights: Towards a Victim-Centred Approach? is due to be published by Cambridge University Press. Sofia has been providing legal advice to the Global Maritime Crime Programme of the UNODC and been sitting at the Non-Executive Board of Advisors of Human Rights at Sea. She is the Editor of the Case and Comment section of the European Human Rights Law Review.

The United Nations is currently undertaking negotiations with a view to concluding an international legally binding instrument for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (the BBNJ Treaty). The BBNJ Treaty will be an implementing agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Although three of four planned negotiating sessions have been completed, it is clear that states are still a long way from reaching a final agreement. This paper will identify key areas of disagreement among states and situate the negotiations within structural challenges facing the law of the sea and international law. The prospects of states agreeing to a Treaty that is ambitious and effective will be assessed. Joanna Mossop is an Associate Professor at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her research interests are in the law of the sea and international environmental law and she has published widely on issues such as marine biodiversity, dispute settlement, maritime security, Antarctica, and whaling. Her book, The Continental Shelf Beyond 200 Nautical Miles: Rights and Responsibilities (Oxford University Press) won the JF Northey Memorial Book Award in 2017. She is a member of the New Zealand delegation to the Intergovernmental Conference negotiating the BBNJ Treaty and is working on several writing projects connected to the process. In 2019 New Zealand nominated her to the list of arbitrators and conciliators under Annexes V and VII of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. She is a member of the Council of the Australia New Zealand Society of International Law. She is a MacCormick Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (until January 2020).

Dire Tladi is a Professor of international law at the University of Pretoria and an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch. He is a member of the UN International Law Commission and its Special Rapporteur on Peremptory Norms of General International Law (Jus Cogens). He is also a member of the Institut de Droit International. He is formerly Principal State Law Adviser for International Law at the Department of International Relations and Cooperation and Legal Adviser of the South African Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. He appeared as counsel on behalf of South Africa before the International Criminal Court in relation to South Africa’s non-arrest of the Sudanese President, Omar Al Bashir. He also served as counsel on behalf of the African Union before the Appeals Chamber of the ICC in relation to Jordan’s non-arrest of Al Bashir.

What have been the key themes in the legal evolution of the UN climate regime? How were these themes addressed In the recently adopted Paris Rulebook? And what are the principal legal issues going forward? The talk will review the legal evolution of the international climate change regime, and preview the upcoming conference of the parties (COP25) in Santiago in December. Daniel Bodansky is Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. He served as Climate Change Coordinator at the U.S. State Department from 1999-2001. His book, The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law, received the 2011 Sprout Award from the International Studies Association as the best book that year in the field of international environmental studies. His latest book, International Climate Change Law, co-authored with Jutta Brunnée and Lavanya Rajamani, was published by Oxford University Press in June 2017, and received the 2018 Certificate of Merit from the American Society of International Law as the best book in a specialized area of international law published the previous year. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a graduate of Harvard (A.B.), Cambridge (M.Phil.) and Yale (J.D.).

If a state withdraws from a treaty in a manner that violates its own domestic law, will this withdrawal take effect in international law? The decisions to join and withdraw from treaties are both aspects of the state’s treaty-making capacity. However, while international law provides a role for domestic legal requirements in the international validity of a state’s consent when joining a treaty, it is silent on this question in relation to treaty withdrawal. This discussion will consider this issue in light of recent controversies concerning treaty withdrawal – including the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, South Africa’s possible withdrawal from the International Criminal Court, and the threatened US denunciation of the Paris Agreement - and will propose that the law of treaties should be interpreted so as to develop international legal recognition for domestic rules on treaty withdrawal equivalent to that when states join treaties, such that a manifest violation of domestic law may invalidate a state’s treaty withdrawal in international law. Hannah Woolaver is an Associate Professor in Public International Law at the Law Faculty of the University of Cape Town. Her research interests lie in public international law, focusing on the relationship between international law and domestic law, the law on the use of force, and international criminal law. Prior to joining the UCT Law Faculty in 2012, she completed her Ph.D. in international law at the University of Cambridge, B.C.L. at the University of Oxford, and LL.B. at the University of Durham. Dr. Woolaver is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge, and the Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia, and has previously been a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto.

Despite three decades of legal development, existing systems of law fail to provide effective foundations for limiting climate change. The inadequacy of existing systems of law is thrown into relief and compounded by ongoing debates centered around who we are, and how we should relate to one another as national and international citizens. Even as climate law emerges and evolves based on notions of shared responsibility, and intra- and inter-generational equity, these norms are challenged by swelling populist and nationalist movements worldwide. This presentation explores the relationship between ongoing efforts to address climate change and evolving discourse on political identity and the rule of law focusing on two background questions, these being the degree to which there exists an 'international community', as such, that underlies and advances collective climate goals; and the extent to which shared understandings of the meaning and substantive content of the rule of law provide a foundation for addressing climate change.