Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures 2025: Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law: Continuing Conversations with Karen Knop

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

Session III Private and Foreign Relations Law

Professor Anne Peters in conversation with Dr Roxana Banu

Chair: Professor Campbell McLachlan

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

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

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

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

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

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