LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

Lecture summary: Recent literature on human rights has proposed to go beyond the dualism of essentialist versus historicist conceptions of human rights. It is argued that ‘the history of human rights’ has to be expanded as ‘to include a moral history of the century after the Enlightenment’ (Hoffmann). This lecture highlights as well the inquiry of continuities within the epistemological framework of human rights and natural rights. I am employing for this purpose historical understandings of natural rights and the role they played in the history of international law. The theologian-jurist Francisco de Vitoria and the jurist-theologian Hugo Grotius, the so-called fathers of the discipline of international law, and later other authors, such as John Locke, became famous for detaching natural subjective rights from their original roots in individual moral theology and relocating them in the context of encounters between peoples. The fact that in doing so they contributed to a new form of natural law and arguably founded international law meant that their moral-epistemological endeavours bore significant fruit.

Part 1: From Colonial Companies to Global Corporations In this lecture, I will introduce the problematic of the corporation in international law. The modern corporation is often understood to be a child of the state, a child which has grown too powerful to control. However, we need to go back further than the advent of the modern corporation in order to see that the Company emerged in the early modern period not as a child of the state but rather as a form of associational life which exercised public authority and which rivalled other such forms, including the state. In this lecture, I will suggest ways in which a richer understanding of the history of the corporation and its jurisprudential form can illuminate contemporary patterns of global ordering. Part 2: Decolonisation and Battles over Global Corporations and International Law This lecture will trace the struggles over the question of the corporation, how it should be conceptualized, and its proper relation to international law during the period bookended by the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Cold War. It will focus in particular on the attempt in 1974, by the ‘Group of 77’ developing states, to assert international legal control over trans or multi-national corporations through the establishment of the Commission on Transnational Corporations, as well as consider the rivalrous jurisprudence and institutional initiatives emerging at the same time. Part 3: Contemporary Patterns of Ordering: Business and Human Rights and International Investment Law This lecture will consider what happened to the earlier struggles over the global corporation, once history ‘ended’, and three worlds putatively became one. It will trace the twin emergence of International Investment Law, and Business and Human Rights, in order to ask what account of the international - and what kind of world - is authored and authorised by those ‘regimes’.

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law held a Symposium on Friday, 13 October 2017 to celebrate the life and work of its founder, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht CBE QC LLD, Honorary Professor Emeritus of International Law at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Trinity College, and founder and Honorary Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, who died on 8 February 2017. The video provides a snapshot of the symposium.

In this lecture, which is based on his 2017 German Law Journal article, Matthew will argue for a reading of the work of Martti Koskenniemi—arguably the most significant international legal thinker of the post-Cold War era—as an exercise in (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. Excavating the links between Koskenniemi and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and analyzing the origins of those links in Koskenniemi’s debt to the Harvard branch of the American Critical Legal Studies (‘CLS’) movement, Matthew will argue that over almost thirty years Koskenniemi has employed psychoanalytic techniques to rebuild the self-confidence of international law(yers). The success of this confidence-building project explains the acclaim Koskenniemi’s work enjoys. As international law’s psychoanalyst he has defined the identity of the international lawyer and mapped the structure of international legal argument, stabilizing international law’s present reality by synchronizing it with narratives of its past. Any attempt to destabilize that reality or depart from present structures into an alternative future must start from an analysis of Koskenniemi’s methods and it is in this sense, and not out of a more pure interest in Koskenniemi’s work, that Matthew seeks to deconstruct Koskenniemi’s oeuvre. This lecture seeks to situate Koskenniemi’s method, reveal his choices and explore their limits in an effort to develop (tentative) proposals for a “new” international law(yer) and an international legal future outside the structure that Koskenniemi has mapped so effectively and affectively. Dr Matthew Nicholson joined Durham Law School as Lecturer in International Law in September 2016. Before joining Durham he worked at the University of Southampton as Lecturer in Public International Law (2012-2016), having completed his PhD at UCL in 2013. Matthew's work has been published in specialist and generalist law journals with international reach. His 2015 article 'The Political Unconscious of the English Foreign Act of State and Non-Justiciability Doctrine(s)' won the International and Comparative Law Quarterly's 'Young Scholar Prize'. He has also published in Law and Literature, Law and Critique, and the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly. His research and teaching interests cover all aspects of international law, with particular interests in international legal theory, international environmental law and policy (climate change in particular), and the relationship between national and international law.

Lecture summary: A question that is often under-theorised, or perhaps more accurately, is taken for granted, is the systematicity of international law. The systemic nature of international law too often is simply presumed, and rests on a vision of international law as merely a body of rules. In this lecture, an alternative account of international law's systematicity will be advanced, one which encompasses not only the systemic character of international legal rules, but instead portrays international law as a socially-constructed system, in which certain key actors play a particularly influential role.

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL), University of Cambridge hosts a regular Friday lunchtime lecture series on key areas of International Law. Previous subjects have included UN peacekeeping operations, the advisory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the crime of aggression, whaling, children and military tribunals, and theories and practices for proving individual responsibility criminal responsibility for genocide and crimes against humanity. This lecture, entitled 'A time map for international law' was delivered at the Lauterpacht Centre on Friday 24 November by Dr Deborah Whitehall, lecturer at the University of Sydney Law School.

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL), University of Cambridge hosts a regular Friday lunchtime lecture series on key areas of International Law. Previous subjects have included UN peacekeeping operations, the advisory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the crime of aggression, whaling, children and military tribunals, and theories and practices for proving individual responsibility criminal responsibility for genocide and crimes against humanity. This lecture, entitled 'Business and human rights: due diligence in law and practice', was delivered at the Lauterpacht Centre on Friday, 17 November by Professor Robert McCorquodale, Director of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law. Robert McCorquodale is also Professor of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Nottingham, and a barrister at Brick Court Chambers in London. Please note, the question and answer sections of LCIL lectures are omitted to facilitate a free and frank discussion with participants. For more information about the series, please see the Lauterpacht Centre website at http://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL), University of Cambridge hosts a regular Friday lunchtime lecture series on key areas of International Law. Previous subjects have included UN peacekeeping operations, the advisory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the crime of aggression, whaling, children and military tribunals, and theories and practices for proving individual responsibility criminal responsibility for genocide and crimes against humanity. This lecture, entitled 'Cities and climate change in the populist post-Paris world: an international law perspective', was delivered at the Lauterpacht Centre on Friday, 3 November 2017 by Professor Helmut Aust, Professor of Law at the Freie Universitaet Berlin. Please note, the question and answer sections of LCIL lectures are omitted to facilitate a free and frank discussion with participants. For more information about the series, please see the Lauterpacht Centre website at http://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk

The Sir Eli Lauterpacht Lecture is an annual series held by the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law to commemorate the unique contribution that its founder made to international law. This inaugural lecture was delivered as part of the Symposium 'Sir Elihu Lauterpacht: a celebration of his life and work', on Friday, 13th October 2017.The 2017 lecture, entitled 'A return to the Caroline Correspondence, 1838-1842', was delivered at the Faculty of Law by Dino Kritsiotis, Professor of Public International Law, University of Nottingham.

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law held a Symposium on Friday, 13 October 2017 to celebrate the life and work of its founder, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht CBE QC LLD, Honorary Professor Emeritus of International Law at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Trinity College, and founder and Honorary Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, who died on 8 February 2017. Opening speeches were given by:Professor Richard Fentiman, Chair, Faculty of Law, University of CambridgeProfessor Eyal Benvenisti, Director, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of CambridgeDame Rosalyn Higgins, Former President, International Court of Justice