Lauterpacht Centre for International Law

Evening event: 'Time-Lines and Space-Shapes: some things we might or might not learn about the history of international law if we could dive down the shaft of a future rubbish-mine with an enslaved mutant cormorant scavenging for the colour blue' Time: 5.15 pm to 6.45 pm (followed by drinks and snacks) Pre-reading material...

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. This is an in-person event only.

Time: 18:00 hrs - 20:00 hrs (in-person event only) In this paper, part of a broader project on understanding Australia’s relationship with international law through its botanic gardens, I ask what sorts of legal stories botanic gardens contain, and how they are presented to the visitor? Drawing on the growing body of literature on international law’s objects and material culture, its visual culture, and its practices of sightseeing and tourism, I ask what we learn about the narratives of international law, and international law more broadly, by looking for law in the botanic garden? Dr Jessie Hohmann is a Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney. Her work focuses on the objects and material culture of international law, on human rights – with a particular focus on the right to housing – and on Indigenous Peoples in international law. She has a passion for gardening and for exploring new methodologies for international legal thought. Chair: Dr Tor Krever

Time: 5.15 pm to 6.45 pm, followed by drinks and snacks, in the Finley/Berkovitz lecture room, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, 5 Cranmer Road, Cambridge CB3 9BL. Available pre-reading material Please email Raja Dandamudi rvkd2@cam.ac.uk for further information. This event is the third lecture of the Histories of Law and Global Order Seminar series and has been organised by University of Cambridge PhD candidates Rishabh Bajoria and Raja Venkata Krishna Dandamudi.