Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Simanti Dasgupta is an associate professor of anthropology and the director of the International Studies Program at the University of Dayton. Her overarching interest in the politics of citizenship and belonging in postcolonial and neoliberal nation-states link her works. She is currently preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled, Prophylactic Rights: Sex Work, HIV/AIDS and Anti-Trafficking in Sonagachi, India, based on her ethnographic research with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a sex workers’ collective, since 2011. She published this work in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review; Anti-Trafficking Review, Opendemocracy:Beyond trafficking and slavery and The Conversation. She previously authored BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water and Neoliberal Governance in India (Temple University Press, 2015), which examined the emerging neoliberal politics in urban India at the intersection of Information Technology and water privatization. She can be reached at sdasgupta1@udayton.edu.Prophylactic Rights examines the emergence of the sex work labour subjectivity at the intersection of two state surveillance regimes: HIV/AIDS and anti-trafficking. It draws on ethnographic work since 2011 with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Durbar), a grassroots female sex workers' collective in Sonagachi. In 1992 the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health identified sex workers as a High-Risk Group and launched the Sexually Transmitted Diseases/HIV Intervention Project (SHIP) in Sonagachi. SHIP recruited sex workers as peer-educators to introduce others to the etiology of HIV/AIDS and promote the condom as the prophylactic device. In addressing structural barriers –poverty and stigma –SHIP achieved remarkable success in reducing new HIV infections through the sustained use of condoms. More importantly, SHIP extended the prophylactic narrative beyond public health to emphasize the threat the virus posed to the labour and livelihood of the women. The rearticulation of HIV/AIDS as a question of the labouring body that is worthy of rights, was unprecedented in Sonagachi. It motivated the peer educators to establish Durbar in 1995 as a collective to demand sex work rights and juridically delink it from trafficking. The existing literature posits both sex work and sex workers as a priori categories, when the categories themselves are relatively new in Sonagachi. This project examines how the labor narrative emerges in dissociation from ‘prostitution’ and how ‘prostitutes’ come to inhabit the worker position. I argue that for labor to emerge as a political category, the women submitted to HIV/AIDS and anti-trafficking surveillances, while also subverting them with resistive connotations. In formulating what I term, the ‘medicolegal unstable’, I further show that the struggle for labor rights in such instances of historical marginalization, is characteristically uneven, that is, advances in HIV/AIDS prevention and related health rights of sex workers are often undermined by regressive anti-trafficking laws.

Professor Pablo Ibáñez Colomo (LSE) gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "Law, Policy, Expertise: Judicial Review in EU Competition Law" on 16 March 2022 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CELS (the Centre for European Legal Studies). Biography: Pablo Ibáñez Colomo is Professor of Law and Jean Monnet Chair in Competition and Regulation at London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Bruges), Joint General Editor of the Journal of European Competition Law & Practice and co-editor of the Chillin’ Competition Blog. He received a PhD from the European University Institute in June 2010 (Jacques Lassier Prize). Before joining the EUI as a Researcher in 2007, he taught for three years at the Law Department of the College of Europe (Bruges), where he also completed an LLM in 2004. This entry provides an audio-only item for iTunes. For more information see: https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

Regenerative medicine seeks to regrow, repair, or replace damaged tissues. Current regenerative technologies include the bio-engineering of organs and tissues, cell reprogramming, and gene editing. Such interventions are significant not only for present-day patients, but also for future generations. They challenge the concept of the self as ‘biologically finite’ or ‘genetically determined’ and blur traditional distinctions between therapy and enhancement and between humans, animals, and things.Given the ways in which regenerative medicine blurs socially-significant boundaries, the ethical and legal obligations of clinicians, researchers, funders, and governments are fluid and uncertain. For example, it is unclear whether present policies governing the use of regenerative technologies offer sufficient safeguards, even if access is limited to patients with conditions deemed sufficiently serious to justify the risks.This talk explores whether international human rights law might require governments to identify, monitor, and support translational pathways that would provide broad, equitable access to the benefits of regenerative medicine, or whether international human rights law requires a more controlled approach because of the potential social implications. With regenerative medicine's great potential, the welfare of current and future generations is at stake. We must collectively ask ourselves how best to secure a desirable clinical future for present day and future generations.About the Speaker:Bartha Maria Knoppers is Full Professor, Canada Research Chair in Law and Medicine, and Director of the Centre of Genomics and Policy at McGill University.Baron Cornelius Ver Heyden de Lancey (1889-1984) was a wealthy and public-spirited Dutchman who at different times in his life was a dentist, doctor, surgeon, barrister and art historian. In 1970 he created the De Lancey and De La Hanty Foundation, to promote studies in medico-legal topics. The Foundation generously gave Cambridge the Ver Heyden de Lancey Fund, which since 1996 has funded occasional public lectures on medico-legal issues of current interest.For more information about the Baron Ver Heyden de Lancey Lecture series, please see http://www.lml.law.cam.ac.uk/events/vhdl-events

Dr Or Brook (Leeds University) gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "Non-Competition Interests in EU Antitrust Law: An Empirical Study of Article 101 TFEU" on 11 March 2022 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CELS (the Centre for European Legal Studies). Biography: Dr Or Brook is a Lecturer in Competition Law and the deputy-director of the Centre for Business Law and Practice, School of Law at the University of Leeds, where she teaches EU and international competition law, business regulation, and quantitative research methods. Holding an academic background in law and economics, she employs empirical approaches to study questions related to the goals of competition law, the role of public policy consideration, decentralised enforcement, and the exercise of enforcement discretion. Dr Brook is the director of the UK branch of the International Academic Society for competition law (ASCOLA UK) and a Non-Resident Institute Research Fellow at the Institute for Consumer Antitrust Studies at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law. This entry provides an audio-only item for iTunes. For more information see: https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

Dr Magali Eben (Glasgow University) gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "The antitrust market does not exist... so why should we define one? Market definition's sense and nonsense in digital markets" on 9 March 2022 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CELS (the Centre for European Legal Studies). Biography: Dr Magali Eben is Lecturer in Competition Law at the University of Glasgow, where she teaches UK and EU competition law and US antitrust law. Her current research focuses on antitrust in digital markets, market definition, national and international divergences in competition law, the challenges for competition law created by innovation and technology and legal certainty and coherence in competition law. She is currently writing a book on market definition in digital markets, based on her PhD completed at the University of Leeds. Magali is co-director of the UK Chapter of ASCOLA (the Academic Society for Competition Law). ASCOLA is a global organisation with several regional chapters. ASCOLA's website is https://ascola.org/. ASCOLA UK can be found on Twitter or on LinkedIn. In addition to her academic work, Magali consults for UK and Belgian law firms, both in the area of competition law and EU law more broadly. This entry provides an audio-only item for iTunes. For more information see: https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

The Centre for European Legal Studies (CELS) hosts an annual public lecture in honour of Lord Mackenzie-Stuart, the first British Judge to be President of the Court of Justice. Among the eminent scholars of European legal studies invited to give the lecture are Professor Joseph Weiler, former Judge David Edwards of the European Court of Justice, and Advocate-General Francis Jacobs of the European Court of Justice. The texts of the Mackenzie-Stuart Lectures are published in the Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies.The 2022 Mackenzie-Stuart Lecture was delivered by Professor Stephen Weatherill (Emeritus Jacques Delors Professor of European Law, Oxford University) under the title 'Saving Football from Itself: Why and How to Re-make EU Sports Law' on 3 March 2022.Abstract: EU law's application to sport is ad hoc, ex post facto and driven by competition law (and occasionally free movement law). Something more systematic would be helpful - not least because governance in sport needs reform to prevent corruption, intransparency, unaccountable power etc. The latest example/flashpoint being the European SuperLeague. This talk aims to explore these issues further.More information about this lecture, including photographs from the event, is available from the Centre for European Legal Studies website at:https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/mackenzie-stuart-lectures

Speaker: Professor Alberto Saiz Garitaonandia (University of the Basque Country) Among some other problems, due to court congestion and case backlog, many judicial systems are seen as slow and unable to offer a response to the citizen´s demands in a reasonable time. The limitations and restrictions implemented by the different governments during the Covid 19 pandemic crisis have exacerbated the previous concern, but at the same time has shown how new technologies, such as videoconferencing, can be introduced and play an important role in the traditionally conservative area of Justice. In this context, the rapid improvement of the artificial intelligence (AI) in the last few years and its extensive use in some transcendent spheres of our lives makes us wonder how we could integrate such a technology in the area of justice, supporting or, even more, substituting a judge. In fact, a certain amount of studies using machine learning has achieved a significant level of accuracy predicting judicial outcomes. However, problems such as bias and lack of transparency may limit the deployment of AI in the judiciary. In any case, if it wants to preserve its legitimacy the judiciary must adapt itself to the new times and technologies used by the society it is serving. As some commentators have stated, we should not see the court as a place, but as a service that may be provided in different ways. About the speaker: Alberto Saiz Garitaonandia is currently a Professor of Procedural Law at the University of the Basque Country. Prof. Saiz Garitaonandia served as Director of the Basque Government Legal Department - Solicitor General (2013-2020). He was awarded a Visiting Fellowship in Clare Hall College at the University of Cambridge for the academic year 2021-2022 where, invited by the Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law (3CL), he is researching in the area of artificial intelligence applied to dispute resolution. He has been Visiting Professor and Researcher at Stanford University, Georgetown University, American University, Florida International University and University of Nevada (USA). He is the author of several books and articles and has served as a member of the Executive Board of the European Society of Criminology (2011-2013), directing its Annual Conference in 2012. His areas of research include the Organization of Justice, Law and New Technologies and Alternative Dispute Resolution. Prof. Saiz Garitaonandia holds a Law Degree, a Degree in Political Sciences and an Executive MBA from Deusto Business School (2017-2018), which included the Value Innovation Programme at INSEAD (France) and the Global Gateway Program at Fordham University (USA). His PhD received the Extraordinary Doctor´s Degree Award, a special mention for the quality of his thesis. 3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, which are are kindly supported by Travers Smith featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners. For more information see the Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law website at http://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL) and the Centre for European Legal Studies (CELS) held an online Rapid Response Seminar on the War in Ukraine on 7 March 2022. On the 24 February 2022 Russian troops launched a fully-fledged invasion of Ukraine after force had been used between the two countries in February 2014 with the annexing of Crimea by Russia. The UN General Assembly in its emergency session decided on 2 March 2022 that it: ‘[d]eplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine in violation of Article 2 (4) of the Charter; demands that the Russian Federation immediately cease its use of force against Ukraine and to refrain from any further unlawful threat or use of force against any Member State; also demands that the Russian Federation immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders and [d]eplores the 21 February 2022 decision by the Russian Federation related to the status of certain areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine as a violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and inconsistent with the principles of the Charter.’ In this Webinar we aimed to analyse the international and EU law aspects of the war in Ukraine. Experts on international and EU law, discussed different aspects of the use of force by Russia, and the European Union’s reaction. It will brought different legal perspectives together and provided expert opinions on this new and troubling development in international law in Europe. Speakers: - Professor Marc Weller: Use of Force – UN Charter – Security Council, also Peace Treaty and International Humanitarian Law - Dr Dan Saxon: International Criminal Law – Crime of Aggression – International Criminal Court jurisdiction - Francisco-José Quintana: Human Rights in War - Professor Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger: Protection of Livelihoods and the Environment during War in Ukraine - Dr Emilija Leinarte: European Union Relations with Ukraine – EU-Ukraine Association Agreement - Dr Markus Gehring: EU Common Foreign and Security Policy, external dimension of migration and prospect for Ukraine’s EU membership For more information see: https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/

Professor Dimitry Kochenov (Central European University) gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "Enforcing Passport Apartheid through EU Law: From Internal Market to the Polish Border" on 23 February 2022 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CELS (the Centre for European Legal Studies). Biography: Dimitry Kochenov leads the Rule of Law Research Group at the Central European University Democracy Institute in Budapest and is Professor of Global Citizenship and Values at the CEU Department of Legal Studies in Vienna. He is also visiting professor of citizenship and the rule of law at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. Prof. Kochenov taught different aspects of citizenship, constitutional and EU law worldwide, including at Princeton, Oxford, Groningen, Turin and Osaka and published widely on these issues. His most recent book (Citizenship, MIT Press 2019) has been translated into several languages and reviewed in The New York Review of Books. Dimitry consults governments and international organizations on the matters of his academic interest and served as the founding chairman of the Investment Migration Council (Geneva). Abstract: The European Union is a clear-cut example of the passport apartheid in action, where blood-based statuses of attachment to public authority distributed at birth (citizenships), which predetermine the course of life of all of us to a great degree are taken particularly seriously. The contribution will elaborate on this starting point using two examples showcasing the EU law-based aspects of this global system of injustice: the near complete exclusion of non-EU citizens from the fundamental freedoms in the EU and the pro-active stance of the Union and the Member States in ensuring that the right to seek asylum in the EU is turned into an unworkable proclamation. The two examples will allow enriching a general sketch of what passport apartheid is and which role is played by it in the contemporary world elaborated by Prof. Kochenov in the I-CON with a focus at the global level: https://academic.oup.com/icon/article/18/4/1525/6169921. The analysis of the two examples suggests that the EU is a deeply atypical constitutional system in that it assumes that the core of its law should not apply to those who 'do not belong' by default, including, largely, the idea of the Union's very existence as a territory of directly enforceable supranational rights. This starting position fetishising the personal status of legal attachment to the Union makes the European integration project the best case study for passport apartheid in the world, since all the other legal systems are never as explicit in excluding the foreigners from the most essential rights by default. The atypical nature of the Union on this count is significantly undertheorized and this paper aims to start bridging the gap between the reality of EU law and the numerous proclamations about the Union's equitable value-laden nature. For more information see: https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

Professor Jens Frankenreiter (Washington University in St Louis) gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "Cleaning of Corporate Governance" on 22 February 2022 as a guest of 3CL (The Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law). Abstract: Although empirical scholarship dominates the field of law and finance, much of it shares a common vulnerability: an abiding faith in the accuracy and integrity of a small, specialized collection of corporate governance data. In this paper, we unveil a novel collection of three decades’ worth of corporate charters for thousands of public companies, which shows that this faith is misplaced. We make three principal contributions to the literature. First, we label our corpus for a variety of firm- and state-level governance features. Doing so reveals significant infirmities within the most well-known corporate governance datasets, including an error rate exceeding eighty percent in the G-Index, the most widely used proxy for “good governance” in law and finance. Correcting these errors substantially weakens one of the most well-known results in law and finance, which associates good governance with higher investment returns. Second, we make our corpus freely available to others, in hope of providing a long-overdue resource for traditional scholars as well as those exploring new frontiers in corporate governance, ranging from machine learning to stakeholder governance to the effects of common ownership. Third, and more broadly, our analysis exposes twin cautionary tales about the critical role of lawyers in empirical research, and the dubious practice of throttling public access to public records. Bio: Jens Frankenreiter is a visiting professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of business law, contract law, and comparative law. His work draws on methods from economics, statistics, and data science to improve our understanding of contracting, private and public lawmaking, and legal institutions. A particular focus of his work is on the use of large amounts of texts and other forms of big data. His writing has appeared in leading academic journals, among them the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Jens holds a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. Before coming to Washington University, he was a Senior Research Fellow at Max Planck Bonn, a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, and a Post-Doc at the Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership. 3CL Seminars are kindly supported by Travers Smith. For more information see the Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law website at http://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/