The IILAH Podcast

In this episode, Dr Ellycia Harrould-Kolieb (Faculty of Science, University of Melbourne) Professor Karen N Scott (University of Canterbury) and Professor Margaret Young (Melbourne Law School) shared reflections on their experiences at the 2025 United Nations Oceans Conference (UNOC3). The United Nations Oceans Conference in Nice, France, was a five day event in June involving more than 60 heads of states and governments and over 15,000 participants. Its published outcome, the ‘Nice Ocean Action Plan’ comprises a political declaration (A/CONF.230/2025/L.1) and voluntary commitments which seek to address the grave state of ocean health. Calls to expand marine protection, curb pollution, regulate the high seas, and unlock financing for vulnerable coastal and island nations were advanced in this third summit, dubbed UNOC3, which followed previous conferences in New York (2017) and Lisbon (2022). Alongside the ‘blue zone’ of government delegations and the ‘green zone’ of civil society engagement were side-events in universities and other organisations. The three speakers of this episode – academics in Australia and New Zealand – attended UNOC3 in various research capacities and present their reflections and critical perspectives. This event was organised by the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH), Melbourne Climate Futures (MCF), the International Law Association (Australian branch) and the Oceans and International Environmental Law Interest Group (OIELG) of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (ANZSIL).

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered its long-awaited Advisory Opinion on the obligations of States in respect of climate change on 23 July 2025. In this episode, Melbourne Law School experts Dylan Asafo, Rohan Nanthakumar, Professor Jackie Peel and Professor Margaret Young discussed the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion and its implications for international law. The ICJ is expected to provide legal clarity on two questions: (a) the obligations of States under international law to ensure the protection of the climate system from greenhouse gas emissions, for States and for present and future generations; and (b) the legal consequences of these obligations for the States that have caused significant harm to the climate system, especially with respect to (i) injured or particularly vulnerable States such as small island developing states; and (ii) current and future generations. This event was co-hosted by IILAH, the Melbourne Centre for Law and the Environment (MCLE), Melbourne Climate Futures (MCF), the Laureate Program on Global Corporate Climate Accountability and the Oceans and International Environmental Law Interest Group (OIELG) of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (ANZSIL).

In this episode of the IILAH Podcast, Professor Karin van Marle (University of Western Cape) presents on five concepts and explores how they relate to each other and how they could contribute to a jurisprudence beyond law. This seminar was chaired by Professor Ann Genovese. As legal scholars/ academics engaged with legal issues, or to follow Shaun McVeigh and Ann Genovese, as jurisprudents, we work with many concepts, ideas and traditions. Professor Karin van Marle is currently trying to bring five concepts (linked to ideas and traditions) that she has worked on over three decades together in a short monograph. There concepts are slowness; refusal; limit(s); transformation and space(s). The aim of Karin's presentation is to unpack the five concepts mentioned above, how they relate to each other and how they could contribute to a jurisprudence beyond law.

In this episode, Dr Daniel McLoughlin (UNSW) presents on Giorgio Agamben’s Covid Critique and the Homo Sacer Project. This seminar was chaired by Dr Richard Joyce. On the 26th of February 2020, Giorgio Agamben published a short piece on his personal website, entitled ‘Invention of an Epidemic,’ which argued that the Italian state was exploiting the appearance of COVID-19 to govern by emergency decree. Over the following year, he went on to criticise the use of masks, compared the “Green Pass” to the Yellow Star, and argued that academics teaching online were the “perfect equivalent” of Nazi collaborators. Agamben’s work has been enormously influential in critical legal theory over the past two decades. However, these interventions generated a great deal of criticism, with commentators accusing him of peddling “critical-cum-conspiracy theory,” and urging us to “forget about Agamben.” This paper analysed Agamben’s interventions around the pandemic and their relationship to his philosophical critique of law and politics. It argued that they illustrate limits to his analysis of sovereignty and his concern with the politics of totalitarianism, as they have the potential to play into a politics that presupposes a virtuous liberal status quo that has been lost and needs to be restored. There are, however, two aspects of Agamben’s thought in the Homo Sacer project that mitigate against this conceptual danger: his deconstruction of the concepts that underpin the legitimacy of the modern democratic state; and his analysis of the relationship between liberal democracy, biopolitics, and governmentality. Daniel McLoughlin’s claim is that these issues, taken together, have generated the much-noted proximity between Agamben’s critique of the response to COVID, and that of the far right.

In this episode, Alofipo So’oalo Fleur Ramsay and Professor Stewart Motha present on climate justice and insurgent lawyering in the International Court of Justice and beyond. This seminar was chaired by Professor Margaret Young. Climate destruction and dispossession is having its greatest impact on small island communities and nations. In December 2024 the ICJ held oral hearings in its Advisory Opinion on Climate Change. Drawing on experiences in Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Vanuatu and beyond – this seminar examined the strategies and techniques of insurgent lawyering deployed in the ICJ process and in other courts and tribunals. While the dominant emitters of GHGs have sought to narrow the ambit of applicable international law to the United Nations Framework Agreement on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement – island states have pushed for the application of the full corpus of international law. The nature of loss, damage, and harm; the historical and future obligations of states, and the status of indigenous cosmologies are what is at stake in climate litigation. What legal strategies redeem marginalised peoples and their knowledges?

The Institute for International Law and the Humanities was pleased to celebrate the publication of Associate Professor Anna Arstein-Kerslake's book, 'The Right to Legal Personhood of Marginalised Groups'. Anna was joined in conversation with Dr Erin O'Donnell and Associate Professor Olivia Barr. Professor Margaret Young chaired this event. The right to legal personhood has been enshrined in human rights law since its inception with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. However, the right has been largely overlooked. This book explores the marginalisation occurring as a result of barriers to the right to legal personhood and how this can be rectified. It analyses the right in relation to disability, gender, indigenous people, racial minorities, migrant groups, and stateless people. It presents a legal argument for the protection of the right and a normative analysis of the importance of the right in achieving equality in socio-legal systems

This episode of the IILAH podcast captures the discussion at 'Queer Connections: A Triple Book Launch', where speakers celebrated and drew out the connections between three recent edited volumes focused on queer approaches to law: - Nuno Ferreira, Maria Federica Moscati & Senthorun Raj (eds), Queer Judgments (2025, Counterpress) - Claerwen O’Hara and Tamsin Phillipa Paige (eds), Queer Engagements with International Law: Times, Spaces, Imaginings (Routledge, 2024) - Tamsin Phillipa Paige and Claerwen O’Hara (eds), Queer Encounters with International Law: Lives, Communities, Subjectivities (Routledge, 2024) 'Queer Judgments' brings together scholars, lawyers, and activists from around the world who are interested in re-imagining and re-writing legal judgments by using queer and related critical perspectives. This edited collection has an international reach and multidisciplinary scope, and takes the reader through 26 judgments and commentaries on various legal fields: from crime and sodomy cases to privacy and discrimination cases, from family and parenthood cases to health and reproduction cases, and ending with asylum and migration cases. Queer Judgments is intended to be a teaching, research, and advocacy resource for anyone interested in critical perspectives on jurisprudence, queerness, and social justice. 'Queer Encounters with International Law' and 'Queer Engagements with International Law' are sibling edited books, which apply insights from queer theory to a range of new issues and topics in international law. Queer Encounters explores new issues relating to gender, sexuality and LGBTIQ communities in international law, such as recent contestation over the definition of ‘gender’ in international criminal and human rights law and the possibility of building an international queer abolitionist movement. Queer Engagements moves beyond queer theory’s site of origin by applying queer theory to a range of new topics international law not directly related to gender and sexuality, including international environmental law, international space law, international heritage law and travaux préparatoires. Speakers included: Dr Senthorun (Sen) Raj, Dr Claerwen O'Hara, Professor Di Otto, Dr Julia Dehm, Dr Danish Sheikh and Sarah Ward.

The Concept of International Law Reform and the Case of Negotiated Settlements in Foreign Bribery Matters In this episode of the IILAH Podcast, Dr Radha Ivory presented on the topic of international law reform and the case of negotiated settlements in foreign bribery matters. This seminar was chaired by IILAH member and ANZSIL President, Professor Alison Duxbury. The concept of reform is present in its absence in the literature on international lawmaking and legal theory. The international legal system is subject to pressures for change. Its actors respond to those pressures with projects for legal improvement. Scholars comment on those malfunctions and attempted fixes, some elaborating general frameworks for appraisal, others conceiving of transnational law-making processes and yet others deconstructing the very discourse of international legal progress. However, as a group, international lawyers have baulked at the concept of reform. That aversion has been attributed to our discipline’s defensive posture and the international legal system’s lack of machinery for efficiently replacing outdated principles and rules. ‘Reform’ implies an admission of deficit and an orderly and authoritative change process that would not seem to be in keeping with typical pathways of legal change beyond the state. This article seeks to reverse that trend by proposing a two-part concept of international law reform. The procedural part of that concept enables legal scholars to discern and describe instances of quasi-legislative change in the international legal space. The substantive part prompts them to select and apply criteria for assessing the merits of a particular textual change or proposal. The resultant concept of international law reform is necessary, Radha argues, in a legal system that lacks centralised legislative processes and comprehensive rules for demarcating and legitimating authoritative normative developments. Through a detailed case study from international anticorruption law, the article shows how international law reform is an essential framework for analysis. Radha's published paper can be read here: https://academic.oup.com/ejil/article/35/4/867/7930301

In the episode of the IILAH Podcast, Professor Harro van Asselt (University of Cambridge) presents on the topic of phasing out fossil fuels under international law. This seminar was chaired by Professor Margaret Young and co-hosted with the Melbourne Centre for Law and the Environment. At the UN Climate Summit in 2023, the fight over a fossil fuel phase-out took centre stage, resulting in a decision calling on countries to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels. Professor van Asselt first examined why there have been growing calls for a fossil fuel phase-out, and why international law should play a role in governing the transition away from fossil fuels. Next, he discussed the international regulation of phasing out fossil fuels, focusing on climate change law, human rights law, and investment law. Lastly, he explored options for reform, including through the international climate change regime as well as through a proposed fossil fuel treaty.

In this episode of the IILAH Podcast, Daniel Quiroga-Villamarin, presents on his book project, 'Architects on the Better World'. This seminar was chaired by Dr Laura Petersen. Even before the Unitedstatesean President Truman urged the attendants of the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization to see themselves as “architects of the better world,” the field of global governance has proven to be a fertile ground for metaphors drawn from architecture. Indeed, in the collective imagination of practitioners and scholars alike, the international legal order appears as a vast and towering edifice: a veritable “architecture” that overlooks “areas” of governance sustained by normative “pillars.” But international law’s castles, of course, were not built solely in the air. For the metaphorical use of architectonical language only hides international law’s profound lack of engagement with the material and concrete spaces in which the “international” is produced, contested, and disputed. Conversely, my book project, takes the “architecture of international cooperation” as a relevant question for international legal history. Instead of taking purpose-built environments for granted, I trace the birth of what I call the “international parliamentary complex” during international law’s “move to institutions” in the short twentieth century (1919-1998). With this, I refer to the emergence of buildings that claimed to serve as “international parliaments” throughout this period —especially those linked to universal or regional International Organizations. I follow this arc from “interwar” Geneva to the end of the Cold War, studying the ways in which this tendency to “parlamentarize” interpolity relations has mutated throughout the century. I do so by drawing from multilingual archival materials related to buildings erected in Geneva, New York City, Bogotá, Addis Ababa, Vienna, and Rome. By historicizing space and spatializing history, I explore the intersections between international law, democracy, and architecture in our unending quest to construct a just, and hopefully “better,” international order.