LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

Lecture summary: There are currently two important issues confronting the international space community. Does international space legislation permit the digging of resources from celestial bodies? And: how to get rid of the enormous amount of space junk that currently populates at interesting orbit and threaten space activities? The lecture will try to give answers to these problems by highlighting the current state of affairs with regard to space legislation which is a mix of international treaty law and what some people call “soft” law. Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Stephan Hobe is Director of the Institute of Air Law, Space Law and Cyber Law and Professor at the University of Cologne. He is author and editor of more than 300 books and articles including “Introduction to Public International Law”, 10th edition 2014, “European Law”, 9th edition 2018 and Space Law (2019). He is member of the board of several scientific associations: International Institute of Space Law, European Centre for Space Law, membre titulaire of the Académie Française de l’Air et de l’Espace and of the International Academy of Astronautics and Vice-president of the German Society of International Law. Professor Hobe is a Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law for the Lent Term 2020.

Join us for a panel discussion on contemporary developments and future prospects in business and human rights litigation involving transnational corporations. The expert panellists will discuss recent developments in UK courts, including legal and policy implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in Vedanta Resources (which paved the way for Zambian citizens to bring tort claims in English courts against UK-based Vedanta Resources) and the forthcoming Supreme Court appeal involving claims against Royal Dutch Petroleum in respect of environmental harm alleged to have been caused by its Nigerian subsidiary. The discussion will involve comparative and practical perspectives and will examine the broader policy and normative concerns arising from business and human rights litigation for the responsibility of non-state actors, transnational corporate governance and international law more generally.

Lecture summary to print: 20 years later - How has International Law evolved as a legal Order? In 2000, Professor Dupuy delivered the General Course of International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law in The Hague, under the title L’Unité de l’ordre juridique international; it is an argumented criticism of the theory of the so called «fragmentation» of international law. Pierre-Marie Dupuy developed in this course, published in 2003 (Vol. 297) his theory on the dialectic tension between two grounds of unity of the international legal order: on the one hand the formal one, based on the technical forms and procedures of law, directly connected with the Hart’s theory of law as developed in The Concept of Law; on the other hand, the substantial unity, a hierarchical one, based not any more on the forms, which are neutral in essence, but on the very content of some peremptory norms of international law (jus cogens); this substantial unity entails a number of rather easily identifiable rules including in particular some fundamental principles of human rights law; but, as demonstrated by the international case law, substantial unity also includes a few «fundamental» rights of the State, to speak like the ICJ in one of its advisory opinions (Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, 1996) and this constitutes a supplementary factor of inherent tension. Two competing principles of unity, formal and substantial or material) for the same legal order are not necessarily the best means for ensuring the persistence and overall stability of the whole system! One would have probably been more efficient. But so it is (or was since the sixties) because of the common will of the States composing what is called «the international community of states as a whole» (Art. 51 VCLT), a term which is to be taken not as a mere description of political reality but as the recourse to what is called in legal technics «a legal fiction» (fiction juridique). In his general course, far from predicting the final supremacy of one of these grounds of unity over the other, the two of them being at the same time competing and complementary, the author privileged an open ended conclusion which is far from an Hegelian synthesis; rather, it is indicative of the impossibility of drastically forecasting the overall evolution of the whole international legal system; this is because international law is not only an abstract (and formal) combination of primary and secondary rules; it is also directly conditioned by a number of structural and/or contextual sociopolitical elements which are in constant evolution (a reason why the classical positivist doctrine does not want to take them into account). Whatever the case may be, the tension between the two sources of unity of the international legal order is at the very core of the inherent dynamic of this order. Almost twenty years after the delivery of this course, it seems interesting to review and reconsider this theory of the two kinds of unity of the international legal order (formal and substantial) in particular at a time when an increasing number of «populist» leaders very much seem to ignore, or voluntarily deny the validity of some of the key substantial principles on which the international legal system was re-founded within and around the United Nations in 1945; is, in this respect, the future of international law as a legal order more predictable than before or not? And, if yes, in which direction?

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Professor Daniel Bodansky will speak about ‘Law and Politics in the UN Climate Regime: A Preview of the Santiago Climate Conference.’ Followed by a Q&A. Is implementation of the Paris Agreement on track? What are the Agreement's prospects for success? The talk will review developments in the international climate change regime, including the recently concluded UN Climate Change Summit, analyze the state of play in the UNFCCC regime, and preview the upcoming conference of the parties (COP25) in Santiago in December. Professor 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.).

Lecture summary: Civil war is the greatest military challenge of our time in terms of real time suffering. The mere mention of Afghanistan, Congo, Libya, Somalia, and Syria supports the point. Internal conflicts like these not only result in mass death and destruction of the built and natural environments, they leave populations traumatized for generations. And they impact life far beyond the places of fighting. Mass migration from these wars is helping to trigger demagoguery and destabilization seen around the world. International lawyers are engaged with many of the issues raised by civil war, yet they have done relatively little work on the central questions of whether resort to armed rebellion and intervention in them are lawful. The lecture will investigate the lack of attention to these core questions. It will reveal the long-running, unresolved debate over the morality of resort to civil war. Without a consensus on the moral question, the law remained equivocal. Does that remain true today? Mary Ellen O'Connell is the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law and Research Professor of International Dispute Resolution—Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. Professor O’Connell holds a BA in history from Northwestern University, an MSc in International Relations from LSE, an LLB and PhD from the University of Cambridge, and a JD from Columbia University. She has served as a vice president of the American Society of International Law and chaired the Use of Force Committee of the International Law Association. Before Notre Dame, she was a faculty member at The Ohio State University, the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies Bologna Center, and Indiana University. She was a professional military educator for the U.S. Department of Defense in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany and practiced law with the Washington, D.C.-based international law firm, Covington & Burling. She also worked as Sir Elihu Lauterpacht’s research assistant. Useful links: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/art-of-law-in-the-international-community/15625F4C8A1B44E00774E078910F7CEA https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/the-hague-academy-collected-courses/*-ej.9789004297647.053_312 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/human-rights-and-personal-self-defense-in-international-law-9780190655020?cc=us&lang=en

Lecture Summary: 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 lecture 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. Dr Hannah Woolaver is an Associate Professor in International Law at the Public Law Department of the University of Cape Town. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Prior to coming to UCT, Hannah was awarded an LLB (First Class) at the University of Durham, BCL (Distinction) at the University of Oxford, and PhD at St. John’s College, University of Cambridge. Her doctoral thesis examined the principles of equality of States and non-intervention in relation to failed, rogue, and undemocratic States in international law. She teaches public international law and international criminal law at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and also supervises postgraduate research in these areas. Hannah is a visiting scholar at the Lauterpacht Centre for the Michaelmas Term 2019.

Lecture summary: For many years now Research & Scholarship have become the Alpha and Omega of academic life. Think of the Research Excellence Framework and the cascading effect it has had on the life of UK universities. Think of all other forms of rankings, institutional and individual, which try (miserably) to quantify quality of research, institutional and individual and the effect this has on the recruitment of staff and students and on the career paths of young scholars. Think of money -- public funding, research grants and the like and the impact this, mammon, has on academic life. Though we continue to pay lip service to the importance of teaching, nobody can question that it ranks much lower in how we rank academic excellence.The most coveted appointment as a Research Professor (with less or no teaching) sends an undeniable signal and one does not get a grant which enables a buyout from research in order to focus on teaching. Most professors and lecturers fulfill their teaching duties faithfully, but it is a duty and few, especially in the major Research Universities think of their vocation as educators. One does not naturally think of teaching as worth spending the time, thought and creativity in the same manner we do on our "research". Most dream of being Great Scholars, not great teachers and educators. And if they did, the system would not prize them for that. Distinguished Lectures are typically meant to be an occasion to engage with the latest and most profound in scholarship. A good part of my scholarly effort is dedicated to thinking about how knowledge, insight and creativity can be translated and brought into the classroom. By this I do not mean rhetoric or teaching techniques, or teaching how to do research but the most profound and effective way of engaging our students with the actual content of that which it is our responsibility to teach. A well designed and creative class should, but does not in today's academia, count as much as a well designed and creative article. Taking this route will not, I hope, only honor the memory of Eli Lauterpacht in the most meaningful way I can think of, but perhaps also make a more lasting contribution than any 'scholarly' lecture. Professor Weiler is University Professor at NYU Law School and Senior Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard. Until recently he served as President of the European University Institute, Florence. Prof Weiler is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law (EJIL) and the International Journal of Constitutional Law (ICON).

Lecture Summary: While sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) provide significant opportunities for countries to finance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such investments often raise environmental, social, and governance (ESG) questions in host countries. This lecture analyzes the role of international law in addressing ESG risks in transnational SWF investments. It discusses the guiding principles of socially responsible SWF investments in international law. Dr Damilola OlawuyiDamilola S. Olawuyi is an expert in energy, environment and sustainable development law. He is an Associate Professor of Law at the HBKU Law School, Doha, Qatar, and Director of the Institute for Oil, Gas, Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development (OGEES Institute), Nigeria. He is currently a Herbert Smith Freehills Visiting Professor at Cambridge Law Faculty. His most recent book publications are Extractives Industry Law in Africa (Springer, 2018) and The Human Rights-Based Approach to Carbon Finance (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Dr. Olawuyi has lectured on energy and environmental law in over 40 countries. Dr. Olawuyi serves on the executive committees and boards of several organizations. He is Vice Chair of the International Law Association; co-chair of the Africa Interest Group of the American Society of International Law (2016-2019); and member of the Academic Advisory Group of the International Bar Association’s Section on Energy, Environment, Natural Resources and Infrastructure Law (SEERIL). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sustainable Development Law and Policy.

Lecture summary: How has imperialism as a system determined the origins, nature and trajectory of international law? Is it possible for international law as a body of rules, as system of norms, as a set of institutions, to help create a more just and progressive world order in a world that continues to be shaped by imperialism? This lecture will provide a brief look at the various and arguably limited attempts by international law as a field to engage with the issue of imperialism, focusing in particular on the critical importance and need of a Marxist approach. Professor Latha Varadarajan is a Professor of Political Science, and the Director of the Center on International Security and Conflict Resolution at San Diego State University. She is the author of The Domestic Abroad: Diasporas in International Relations (OUP, 2010) and Imperialism Past and Present (with Emanuele Saccarelli, OUP, 2015). Her articles on transnationalism, nationalism and imperialism have been published in journals including The European Journal of International Relations, International Relations, New Political Science, and Review of International Studies.