Lauterpacht Centre for International Law

Professor Pahuja was recently awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship for her project The Corporate Challenge to Democracy: Harnessing International Law. The starting point for the project is a widely shared intuition: that the rising power of global corporations poses a serious challenge to democratic rule within nation-states. Corporations have gone global, but the mechanisms to ensure they serve the public interest, pay tax and comply with national laws have not. Efforts are frustrated by a mismatch between the global operational structure of multinational corporations, and their national legal form. The intuition sparking the project is that international law - not corporate governance or national laws – is central to creating this disjuncture. And so, the essence of the research program is to understand the rise and influence of global corporations as a question of international law. To do this, the team will take a long historical approach, framed through the lens of authority, and rival forms of law, to consider how the mobility of corporations has been and is facilitated, how rights are created, and how corporate power is produced and made effective through and by law. The overall aim of the project is to produce a new historical, theoretical and conceptual understanding of the relationship between corporations, states, state law and international law from the early modern period to the present day. In this informal seminar, Prof Pahuja will outline the project, possibly map existing approaches, and describe its key elements with the intention of starting a conversation with Lauterpacht Centre researchers, to launch future collaboration. Sundhya Pahuja is ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Professor, Director of the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International law, and Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the Melbourne Law School. She is currently Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Cambridge.

Due to industrial action this event has been postponed until Friday 17 February 2023. Lecture summary: It is alleged that the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) embodied the victory of Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice’s preference to interpret treaties based on the “ordinary meaning of the words” over Sir Hersh Lauterpacht’s view that one instead should seek to ascertain the treaty parties’ “actual intentions.” But is that so? If, as VCLT Article 31(1) provides, the focus is to be on “the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in the light of its object and purpose,” and if that “ordinary meaning” is not, as per Article 32, “ambiguous,” “obscure,” “manifestly absurd or unreasonable,” then why should resort to “Supplementary Means of Interpretation” be appropriate at all “in order to confirm the meaning resulting from the application of article 31”? If, as many believe, the VCLT is hierarchical, shouldn’t interpretation be complete when an “ordinary meaning” is established that is “unambiguous,” not “obscure,” and “neither manifestly absurd or unreasonable”? Did those preferring to determine the treaty parties “actual intentions” in fact sneak into the VLCT’s text that provision for supplementary “confirmation” of a clear “ordinary meaning”? Is to that extent the VCLT in fact, as is said of treaties generally, “an agreement to disagree”? In reality, given the sequential submissions in international arbitrations, as well as before international courts and tribunals, each party, beginning with the Applicant’s or Claimant’s Memorial, followed by Respondent’s Counter-Memorial, the Reply Memorial etc., from the start places before the adjudicator all of its arguments under Section 3. of the VCLT (Articles 31-33). Judge Charles N Brower’s career has been divided between private law practice, first with White & Case LLP in New York City and Washington, D.C., since 2001 as an Arbitrator Member of Twenty Essex Chambers in London, and public service, first with the Office of The Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State (1969-73)(successively as Assistant Legal Adviser for European Affairs, Deputy Legal Adviser and Acting Legal Adviser), as Judge of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal (1983-present), as sub-Cabinet rank Deputy Special Counsellor to the President of the United States dealing with the Iran-Contra affair (1987), as Judge ad hoc of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (1999-2002)(appointed by Bolivia), and the most -appointed of the only five Americans ever to be appointed Judge ad hoc of the International Court of Justice (2014-2022) (appointed by Colombia (1 case) and the United States (2 cases)).

Lecture summary: How does international law change? Must international law await change by external political intervention from outside the legal system? Or does international law provide reasons for its own development to those empowered to develop it? To address these questions, we should draw on an unlikely source. Joseph Raz was one of the greatest legal philosophers of all time. But he wrote relatively little about international law until the last decade of his life. Nevertheless, we should draw on Raz’s ideas to illuminate three pathways of international legal change: in the law of treaties, in customary international law, and in international adjudication. Adil Ahmad Haque is a Professor of Law and Judge Jon O Newman Scholar at Rutgers Law School. Professor Haque writes on the law and ethics of armed conflict, and the philosophy of international law. His first book, Law and Morality at War, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Lecture summary: ‘Is there an international law of remedies?’ asked Cambridge’s very own Christine Gray in 1985. The United Kingdom was sceptical in the 1993 UN General Assembly’s Sixth Committee, with a particular reference to compensation: ‘The international law of remedies was piecemeal and undeveloped … . Many of the authorities culled by the [International Law Commission’s] Special Rapporteur [on State responsibility Arangio-Ruiz] were somewhat old, and there was a legitimate question of how far the guidance they provided remained valid for the current times.’ Yet within eight years the International Law Commission (ILC) adopted the 2001 Articles on responsibility for internationally wrongful acts, following Special Rapporteur James Crawford’s proposal on a provision on compensation in Article 36, without much scholarly controversy or indeed (mostly) even interest. Since then, compensation under international law has been increasingly addressed by international courts and tribunals, and may well play an important role in disputes about war reparations, environmental damage, and historical wrongs. In this lecture, Martins Paparinskis will explain the peculiarities of the international legal order of the 1990s that shaped the Commission’s assumptions regarding compensation, consider the fit of Article 36 within the international legal process of the following two decades, and sketch the direction for possible future developments. Martins Paparinskis is Professor of Public International Law at University College London and a member designate of the International Law Commission. He is a generalist international lawyer with a particular interest in State responsibility and dispute settlement as well as the specialist fields of investment law, human rights law, and transboundary water law, and has published on these topics in leading peer reviewed journals. Papers for pre-reading ahead of the lecture: The Once and Future Law of State Responsibility A Case Against Crippling Compensation in International Law of State Responsibility Crippling Compensation in the International Law Commission and Investor–State Arbitration

Date: 15 & 16 December 2022 - Times: tbc Venue: The Finley Library, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, Cambridge, UK Proposals due by 19 October 2022 Proposals are invited for short presentations on any aspect of the intersection of international law and the corporation. The task is to offer a narrative in a way which centres on or starts with the company or corporation, rather than with other entities. We encourage proposals from other disciplines that engage with this approach and research questions that centre international law and the corporation. Organised by Professors Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne) and Surabhi Ranganathan (Cambridge) . For further details please visit: PhD/Early Career Researcher Workshop (unimelb.edu.au)

Lecture summary: What explains the persistence of the idea of international law’s systematicity in view of its decentralised nature, constantly dependent upon the shifting consent of states and the vagaries of political will? To what extent can its systemic character endure and adapt as the tectonic plates of geo-politics shift? In this lecture, Campbell McLachlan critically re-examines the evidence for the impulse to integrate the disparate elements of international law into a coherent system: the impulse that underpins the principle of systemic integration. He does so in light of the practice of states and international tribunals, which has deepened over the last fifteen years since his research on the principle for the ILC Fragmentation Study Group in 2005. He tests the fruits of this internal analytical perspective against both an increasing scholarly critique and the external disintegrative pressures that the system currently faces––pressures that appear to challenge the very value of global cooperation under law that underpins the idea of systematicity. Campbell McLachlan KC is Professor of Law at Victoria University of Wellington and 2022–23 Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science in the University of Cambridge.

Recording now available The Eli Lauterpacht Lecture was established after Sir Eli's death in 2017 to celebrate his life and work. This lecture takes place on the first Friday lecture of the Centre at the start of the Michaelmas Term in any academic year. The Eli Lauterpacht Lecture for 2022 will be delivered by Professor Noah Feldman. Noah Feldman is Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Chairman of the Society of Fellows, and founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, all at Harvard University. He specializes in constitutional studies, with particular emphasis on power and ethics, design of innovative governance solutions, law and religion, and the history of legal ideas. Further information: https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/noah-r-feldman/

This is an in-person event at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. Lecture summary: Several hundred European ISIS fighters, reportedly including nine British men and fifteen British women, have been held without trial by Syrian Kurdish forces for several years. The UK, like many European governments, are reluctant to repatriate their nationals, and would prefer them to be tried “where the crimes were committed”, concretely meaning prosecutions before the courts of the unrecognised administration of the Kurdish enclave in North-East Syria. Would such trials be lawful under international and European human rights law? How are the requirements of a fair trial transformed when transposed to the courts of a non-state armed group? Does human rights law impose extraterritorial obligations upon the state of nationality of these foreign fighters? René Provost Ad.E. FRSC is Professor of Law at McGill University

All are welcome to attend this lecture: 17:00 hrs - 18:15 hrs. Register online (Please register so that pre-reading papers can be circulated one week in advance of this lecture) This lecture is part of the Legal Histories Beyond the State (LHBS) series in collaboration with the Centre for History and Economics and the Cambridge Centre for Political Thought Dr Charlotte Johann is a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.

A series of three lectures by Professor Mikael Rask Madsen, Professor of European Law and Integration, Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. Due to industrial action these lectures have been rearranged to take place all on Friday 6 March in the following format: 10.00 am - 11.15 am - Part 1 11.15 am - 11.45 am - Coffee break 11.45 am - 1.00 pm - Part 2 1.00 pm - 1.45 pm - Lunch 1.45 pm - 2.45 pm - Q&A 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.