Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

On 23 February 2024 Professor Lusina Ho (University of Hong Kong) delivered the 2024 Cambridge Freshfields Lecture entitled "Re-imagining the Express Trust".Lusina Ho is Harold Hsiao-Wo Lee Professor in Trust and Equity at the Faculty of Law, the University of Hong Kong. While pursuing her teaching and research in Trust, Restitution, and Comparative Trust Law (in particular Chinese Trust Law), she has been consulted by the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the enactment of the Chinese Trust Law and the Government of the Hong Kong SAR on the reform of the Trustee Ordinance. In 2019, she has successfully convinced the Hong Kong SAR Government to launch a trust service for special needs individuals in the territory.She has published widely and her work has been cited in highest appellate courts in common law jurisdictions, and has been translated and published in Japanese. She received from HKU the Outstanding Young Researcher Award in 2006, the Faculty Outstanding Teaching Award in 2017, the Faculty Knowledge Exchange Award in 2018, and the University Knowledge Award in 2018.Timings:Professor Lionel Smith - Introduction: 00:00Dr Sinead Agnew - Introduction: 04:23Professor Lusina Ho: 07:00Dr Brian Sloan - Thanks: 50:15The Cambridge Freshfields Lecture is an annual address delivered by a guest of the Cambridge Private Law Centre, and the event is sponsored by Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.More information about this lecture, including a transcript and photographs from the event, is available from the Private Law Centre website:https://www.privatelaw.law.cam.ac.uk/events/CambridgeFreshfieldsLecture

The Cambridge Pro Bono Project (CPP) hosted the annual lecture featuring Professor Christine Chinkin, FBA.The Cambridge Pro Bono Project is a research centre that draws on the subject-matter expertise of graduate researchers and Faculty experts to produce reports on a wide range of public interest matters. Every year, we invite distinguished speakers to address our researchers, staff, and students at the University of Cambridge. This year's Cambridge Pro Bono Project Annual Lecture will be delivered by Professor Christine Chinkin and chaired by Professor Surabhi Ranganathan, Professor of International Law and Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law.Professor Chinkin, FBA is the founding Director of the Centre for Women, Peace, and Security and Emeritus Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. During her illustrious career, she has served on the Human Rights Advisory Panel established by UNMIK in Kosovo and as Scientific Advisor to the Council of Europe’s Committee for the drafting of the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence. She is Chair of the International Law Association.In commemorating the recent 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Professor Chinkin will speak to how human rights law has engaged with women as subjects and agents in international law, with a focus on the women, peace and security context. She will share her valuable insights into the historical challenges, current opportunities, and the anticipated contributions of practitioners, academics, and researchers.https://www.cpp.law.cam.ac.uk/

Speaker: Professor Paul Deemer (Vanderbilt Law School)Abstract: This lecture will focus on the development and project financing of large international infrastructure projects, and will cover –- What is “project finance” and what is not? How does a “project financing” differ from other types of financing?- Why is project finance used on large infrastructure projects? What is “leverage,” and why is that important?- What legal structures and documents are commonly used in project financings?- Who are the participants in a project financing? What are their roles?- What is the role of the lawyer? Why should a new lawyer be familiar with project finance?In discussing these issues, the speaker will draw on his experience representing clients on projects in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners.For more information: https://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/

Lecture summary: This paper looks at the political purchase of International Conflict Feminism (ICF) in helping constitute the normative framework guiding and legitimizing laws and policies advanced under the rubric of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). It attends to how these have intersected with the work of the international criminal court (ICC) in new modalities of lawfare that have taken place against the backdrop of Security Council action, including its military interventions in Muslim majority countries. These intertwined projects – ICF, CVE and International Criminal Law – can be situated in the dominant structures of global governance that have rendered their driving logics the thinkable default option, and their legitimacy the dominant common sense for diverse groups, from feminist lawyers to military strategists. This analysis comes together in reading the Al Hassan case at the ICC as the grain of sand through which we examine the universe at the crossroads of sharia panic, sex panic and security panic.Vasuki Nesiah teaches human rights, legal and social theory at NYU Gallatin where she is also faculty director of the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights. She has published on the history and politics of human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal law, reparations, global feminisims, and decolonization. Nesiah was awarded the Jacob Javits Professorship (2022), Gallatin Distinguished Teacher Award in 2021 and the NYU Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award in 2020. Her current book projects include International Conflict Feminism (forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press) and Reading the Ruins: Colonialism, Slavery, and International Law. A founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), she is also co-editing TWAIL: A Handbook with Anthony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Michael Fakhri, and Karin Mickelson (forthcoming from Elgar).

Speaker: Joanna Kusiak, Junior Research Fellow in Urban Studies at King’s CollegeBio: Dr Joanna Kusiak is a scholar-activist who works at the University of Cambridge. Born in Poland, she has been shaped by the emancipatory tradition of the Solidarność movement and by the brutality of the neoliberal transformation. Her work focuses on urban land, housing crises, and the progressive potential of law. In 2021 she was one of the spokespeople of Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen, Berlin’s successful referendum campaign to expropriate stock-listed landlords. She is the winner of the 2023 Nine Dots Prize for ’thinking about the box’ about contemporary social challenges. Her winning book ‘Radically Legal: Berlin Constitutes the Future’ will appear in May 2023 in Cambridge University Press.Do we need a revolution to save our cities from the rampant housing crisis? Yes – but this revolution is powered by the law. Right in the middle of the German constitution, a group of ordinary citizen discovers a forgotten clause that allows them to take 240.000 homes back from multi-billion corporations. My talk describes the story of a grassroots movement that convinced one million Berliners to pop the speculative housing bubble a design a new institutional model for managing urban housing.For more about the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group see:https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-group

Speaker: Thomas St Quintin, Hogarth Chambers Abstract: Lessons from the decision of the IPEC in Shazam v Only Fools the Dining Experience, and cases referred to in that decision, addressing the findings that copyright can subsist in fictional characters (and the factors that the court relied upon in reaching that conclusion), and the defences of fair dealing for the purposes of parody and pastiche.Biography: Thomas St Quintin is a barrister at Hogarth Chambers. He specialises in intellectual property, media and entertainment. He has been instructed in cases in the Court of Justice of the European Union and the General Court, and has appeared as the sole or lead advocate in each of the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court, Intellectual Property Enterprise Court, and in the UKIPO. His practice covers all areas of IP law, and is fairly evenly split between patents, trade marks, copyright, designs and confidential information cases (both technical and those involving privacy). He is a co-author of the Modern Law of Trade Marks, of Intellectual Property in Europe, and is a contributor to Copinger and Skone-James on Copyright.For more information see:https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminarsThis entry provides an audio source for iTunes.

Lecture summary: This research examines international law’s longstanding entanglement with communications infrastructure. There is increasing concern regarding the rise of private global power in the form of global digital platforms and their model of information capitalism. This paper responds by focusing on historical connections between international law and infrastructure as a means of examining their relationship in the global communications context. This reveals a longer trajectory to current interest in information capitalism’s effects on international life.Current concerns focus on the power of private digital platforms and the networked communicative infrastructure they maintain for the global economy. Introducing an historical perspective to such debates highlights infrastructure’s ongoing connections to violence and exploitation. This points to the wider and constitutive role of infrastructure in international life and underscores the need to address the blending of public and private forms of power in global governance.While the technologies driving change and re-appraisal within the contemporary international legal imagination are clearly distinct, viewing infrastructure as regulation in the current day requires us to confront continuing patterns of inequality and discrimination, which in turn can be connected with a longer international legal history. Such a focus can also help to explain how the traditional form of international law as a limited system of positive rules and of managerial ordering came to dominate the legal imagination and entrench a state-centrism which now appears anachronistic in light of the reality of private power and its concentration on the international plane.Dr Daniel Joyce is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney. He specialises in international law, media law and human rights. Daniel is an Affiliated Research Fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute at the University of Helsinki, an Associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute and a member of the Allens Hub for Technology, Law & Innovation. His monograph Informed Publics, Media and International Law was published by Hart in 2020. He is a visiting fellow at LSE Law School from September 2023 until March 2024.

Speaker: Stuart Baran, Three New SquareAbstract: The UK Supreme Court recently gave judgment in Thaler, upholding the refusal of patent applications listing DABUS, an AI, as the inventor. After looking at what the UKSC decided and why, I will consider three broader questions that arise from the litigation: (i) why did the case take the shape it did – in particular, was it driven by questions of procedure more than substance?; (ii) what does the judgment mean for patents arising from AI inventions in future?; and (iii) how do we approach the appropriate division of labour between the courts and Parliament in approaching these questions?Biography: Stuart is Barrister at Three New Square Chambers. He was Legal 500 Junior of the Year in IP, IT and Media for 2018. In 2019 he was appointed to a three-year term as one of two Standing Counsel to HM Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks. He practises in all areas of intellectual property, including: patents, SPCs, trade marks, passing off, copyright, designs and confidential information. For more information see:https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Bio: Oliver Wilson-Nunn is an Isaac Newton Research Fellow at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He recently completed his PhD on prison and film in Argentina at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. He has published on prison education in contemporary documentary film and on prison writing from Cuba. He is broadly interested in the relationship between law, criminal justice, and culture in Latin America, with his new project focussing on the relationship between contemporary documentary cinema and the processes of judicialisation and juridification.Prison, the cliché goes, serves as a mirror of society. Films about prison, according to a similarly clichéd logic, serve as a window onto that mirror of society. In this presentation, I move beyond this focus on reflection and refraction to propose a more materially sensitive approach to what prison-based films can tell us about state and society. I reflect on the institutional relationships between the film industry and prisons to show how the very production and exhibition of film—not just the symbolic force of the image itself—reconfigure the relationships between imprisoned people, non-imprisoned people, and the state. Focussing on Argentina, I consider examples of location shooting inside operational prisons, the use of imprisoned people as actors, and the exhibition of film inside prison from the 1930s through to the present day to trouble a tendency among academic lawyers, criminologists, and film scholars to evaluate prison films in terms of their ‘accurate’ or ‘inaccurate’ representation of real-life prisons. By shifting our focus from the truth value of the strictly defined ‘prison film’ towards the broader social relationships produced at the institutional interstice of prison and film, we can better understand prison, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, not as a ‘building “over there” but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere’ (2007, 242).The Cambridge Socio-Legal Group organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. For more about the CSLG, see:https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/researchfaculty-centres-networks-and-groups/cambridge-socio-legal-groupThe CSLG organises and supports events and publications relating to socio-legal research, drawing participants from within the University of Cambridge and around the world. A donation would be instrumental in allowing the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group to continue its cross-disciplinary work:https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/the-cambridge-socio-legal-group

Judges and jurists employ distinctive, and distinctly different, styles of reasoning. Judges develop the common law cautiously, by incremental analogical development. Judicial reasoning is characteristically practical, even pragmatic, with the resolution of concrete disputes paramount. The stability of the common law depends on strong shared, albeit implicit, understandings about its content. Academia might seem hostile to much of this. Academics are expected to build ambitious theories, to investigate legal rules to their theoretical foundations, to question and reject consensus, and above all to innovate. In pursuing such goals, legal scholars risk misconceiving the nature of the common law enterprise, and overlooking its strengths. Jonathan Morgan delivered his inaugural lecture as Professor of English Law on Friday 26 January 2024 at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge. This entry provides an audio source for iTunes.