This episode features a guest lecture delivered at STL Sustainability Innovation & Law Circle by Dr Gonzalo Larrea, Assistant Professor at Utrecht University School of Law. The COP29 outcomes target an expanded role for climate funds in delivering climate finance for developing countries. In his lecture, Dr Larrea provides a comparative analysis of climate funds such as the Global Environment Facility, Green Climate Fund & Adaptation Fund, focusing on their safeguards against negative environmental and social impacts on local communities and proposing reforms to strengthen these safeguards.

This episode begins our “Welcome to STL” series, where we speak with new members of the STL faculty about their work & background. Assistant Professor Kevin Gray, who recently joined STL, is a transnational & constitutional law scholar with a background in philosophy. Here, he discusses his research agenda, including corruption in international arbitration, & upcoming courses at STL.

In this episode, Dr Luo Kaitian and Professor Stephen Minas discuss the practice of labor law in China and its transnational elements, including foreign ESG requirements and the negotiation of labor provisions in international economic agreements. Dr Luo, Founding Partner at Puran Law Firm, also reflects on how to promote workplace diversity and inclusion and offers some advice for students interested in labor law.

In part 2 of our interview, Peking University Law School Associate Professor Dai Xin discusses how to make use of data to improve market efficiency and government performance, digital platform regulation and the need to weigh transparency and privacy imperatives. The conversation also addresses the growing use of artificial intelligence in legal services, the impact of chatbots on access to justice and how AI-generated content will change legal scholarship and education.

This episode features the 1st part of a 2-part interview with Associate Professor Dai Xin from Peking University Law School. In this episode, Prof. Dai discusses his experience of graduating from law school into a financial crisis, offers advice for law students on resilience in challenging times and reflects on his journey into academia, models of legal academia and legal education in a context of rapid technological change.

Professor Ronán Long discusses the significance of the new international agreement under UNCLOS on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction, including its potential to contribute to ocean governance and ecosystem restoration. Professor Long is Director of the WMU-Sasakawa Global Ocean Institute at the World Maritime University.

The co-chairs of the recent ITA-ASIL Conference on “Reforming Arbitration Reform: Emerging Voices, New Strategies, Evolving Values”, Associate Professor Crina Baltag (Stockholm University) and Professor Mark Feldman (STL), speak with Stephen Minas about regionalism, sustainability, diversity and legitimacy in the reform of international commercial and investment arbitration.

This episode features an interview with Asif Qureshi, Professor of Law at STL, on public international law in Northeast Asia and on law reform in national and international law, following the STL workshop on ‘Law Reforms Around the World’. Professor Qureshi also discusses the foundation and work of the Manchester Journal of International Economic Law.

In the 1st episode of our new series, Stephen Minas interviews Anirudh Sridhar, Centre for Policy Research, on climate laws beyond net-zero targets. They discuss what goes into making bottom-up, context-specific climate laws, the governance functions these laws perform and the links between climate policy, coal phasedown, infrastructure and manufacturing in developing countries. They also discuss the trend of upgrading existing laws to tackle climate change and CPR’s ongoing project on context-specific climate governance.

This episode features a discussion on the book ‘Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Cleantech: A Pathway for Developing Countries’. The speakers are the book’s author, STL Associate Professor Joy Xiang, Rob Merges, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati Professor of Law at UC Berkeley & Co-Founder, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, Richard Wilder, General Counsel for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) & STL Associate Professor Stephen Minas. The panellists discuss the state of cleantech transfer & capacity-building for developing countries, innovation, the role of IP law and the experience of similar issues in the pandemic context. We gratefully acknowledge the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology which hosted the event and made the recording available for this podcast.