Speakers: Professor Vanessa Munro (University of Warwick) and Professor Miranda Horvath (University of Suffolk)

Professors Munro and Horvath both actively contributed to Operation Soteria, the joint project between the police and CPS to rethink how allegations of sexual violence should be investigated and prosecuted. In this public lecture they will reflect together on the data they collected and the findings concerning reasons for underperformance, myths and stereotypes affecting charging decisions and the treatment of complainants. They will conclude by reflecting on the prospects for sustainable improvement post-Soteria. There will be opportunities for the audience to ask questions at the end.

For more information see: https://www.cccj.law.cam.ac.uk/past-events-0

On 28 February 2025 The Rt. Hon. Lord Briggs of Westbourne delivered the 2025 XXIV Old Buildings Lecture entitled "Equitable Ownership".

Michael Townley Featherstone Briggs, Lord Briggs of Westbourne became a Justice of the Supreme Court in October 2017.

Lord Briggs grew up around Portsmouth and Plymouth, following his naval officer father between ships, before spending his later childhood in West Sussex. He attended Charterhouse and Magdalen College, Oxford. A keen sailor and the first lawyer in his family, he practised in commercial and chancery work before being appointed to the High Court in 2006. He was the judge in charge of the extensive Lehman insolvency litigation from 2009 to 2013.

Lord Briggs was appointed as a Lord Justice of Appeal in 2013. He was the judge in charge of the Chancery Modernisation Review in 2013, and led the Civil Courts Structure Review in 2015 to 2016. In January 2016 he was appointed Deputy Head of Civil Justice.

Timings:

• Professor Graham Virgo - Introduction: 00:00
• The Rt. Hon. Lord Briggs of Westbourne: 02:07

The XXIV Old Buildings Lecture is an annual address delivered by a guest of the Cambridge Private Law Centre, and the event is sponsored by XXIV Old Buildings.

More information about this lecture is available from the Private Law Centre website:

https://www.privatelaw.law.cam.ac.uk/events

Summary: This talk explains Sudan’s descent into a horrific war that is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The war has displaced over 11 million people, involved the targeting of civilians, including especially women, in mass violence, and precipitated a hunger crisis affecting over 24 million people, with over 630,000 currently facing famine. How, after a momentous civilian uprising in 2018-19 that toppled the dictator Omer el-Bashir after 30 years of authoritarian rule, did Sudan come to this? Unravelling the causes and events that led to tragedy begins with how counter-revolutionary actors within the State benefitted from the priorities of external peacemakers seeking to achieve a democratic transition in order to displace revolutionary forces, before carrying out a coup against that very transition. The war erupted when the counter-revolution itself unravelled, and its two primary bedfellows, the Sudan Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces fell-out violently with each other in a struggle for power. With complex regional geopolitical entanglements and drawing in other armed groups in Sudan, their war to the bitter end has mixed cruel indifference and intentional harm towards civilians in devastating ways. Remarkably, the revolutionary spirit of the Sudanese has not been vanquished, and has found expression in how neighbourhood resistance committees have transformed into ‘emergency response rooms’ to deliver life-saving support. Sudan’s plight and prospects lie precariously within these intersecting trajectories.

Sharath Srinivasan is David and Elaine Potter Professor of International Politics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He is also Founding Director, and currently Co-Director, of the University of Cambridge's Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR). Professor Srinivasan is a Fellow and Trustee of the Rift Valley Institute and a Trustee and Vice-President of the British Institute in Eastern Africa.

Professor Srinivasan’s work focuses on contentious politics in Africa in global perspective, from explaining failed peace interventions in civil wars to rethinking democratic politics in a digital age. He is the author of When Peace Kills Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan: The Comprehensive Peace Agreement and Beyond (British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2020).

Chair: Dr Juliana Santos de Carvalho, Centre Fellow

Speaker: Professor Margo Bagley, Emory University School of Law 

Abstract: 2024 was a year for multilateral IP like no other. WIPO Member states adopted two new treaties last year: the WIPO Treaty on IP, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge and the Riyadh Design Law Treaty. Both were groundbreaking in their mention of one or more of genetic resources, traditional knowledge, traditional cultural expressions, and indigenous peoples and local communities, none of which are standard IP topics and all of which have been controversial additions to the normative work at WIPO. Moreover, both treaties address disclosure of origin for one or more of these controversial areas, another first for a WIPO treaty. I will discuss how these two treaties came to fruition and their ramifications for future multilateral IP treaty-making.

Biography: Margo A. Bagley is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. She returned to Emory in 2016 after ten years at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she held the Hardy Cross Dillard chair. She was the Hieken Visiting Professor in Patent Law at Harvard Law School in Fall 2022. Her scholarship focuses on comparative issues relating to patents and biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and access to medicines, and IP and social justice issues. Professor Bagley served on two National Academies Committees on IP matters, is a technical expert to the African Union in World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) matters, and has served as a consultant to several United Nations organizations. She has served as a US Department of Commerce Commercial Law Development Program advisor and currently serves as a member of the U.S. DARPA ELSI Team for the BRACE project. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a faculty lecturer with the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and also has taught patent related courses in China, Cuba, Israel, and Singapore. She has published numerous articles, book chapters, and monographs as well as two books with co-authors with a third on the way. She is registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, practiced patent law with both Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, and Smith, Gambrell and Russell, and has been an expert witness in several patent cases. A chemical engineer by training, Professor Bagley worked in industry for several years before attending law school at Emory where she was a Woodruff Fellow. She is a co-inventor on patents on peanut butter and bedding technology. 

For more information see:

https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Lecture summary: Property is a fundamental legal institution governing the use of things: who may own what, how and why. Given that such questions extend to a wide range of natural resources essential to human well-being, such as food, water and shelter, then it is reasonable to assume that human rights should play an important role in shaping property rights discourse and practice. And yet this assumption is somewhat misplaced. The relationship between property and human rights and property remains relatively underdeveloped in both practice and academic literature, and virtually non-existent when we move to the maritime domain. In this paper, I explore and question the role that property and human rights can and should play in the maritime domain. I outline how such rights arise and are protected under human rights instruments, before exploring how they might inform the moral and legal distribution of resources. In particular, I focus on how we might balance individual rights and public interests that arise in respect of property, and how these are informed by the nature of the oceans as a commons.

Richard Barnes is Professor of International Law at the University of Lincoln and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea, the University of Tromsø. His current research focuses on the human right to property, ocean commons, and the BBNJ Agreement. He is widely published in the fields of international law and law of the sea. Property Rights and Natural Resources (2009), won the SLS Birks Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. He has edited several collections of essays including Research Handbook on Plastics Regulation (2024), Frontiers in International Environmental Law. Oceans and Climate (2021), Research Handbook on Climate Change, Oceans and Coasts (2020), and The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea: A Living Instrument (2016). Professor Barnes a member of the ILA Committee on the Protection of People at Sea. He has acted as a consultant for the WWF, Oceana, ClientEarth, the European Parliament, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. He has also provided advice to foreign ministries. He has appeared numerous times before Parliamentary select committees on matters related to law of the sea, fisheries and Brexit. He is on the Editorial Board of International and Comparative Law Quarterly, the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law, the New Zealand Yearbook of International Law, the German Yearbook of International Law, and the Portuguese Yearbook of the Law of the Sea. 

Speaker: Dr Stuart Baran is a barrister at specialist intellectual property chambers Three New Square IP

Abstract: The UK Supreme Court has now given its long (and long-awaited) judgment in SkyKick v. Sky. It concerns the appropriate specification of goods and services as part of a trade mark application. In particular, the UKSC was asked to consider the circumstances in which a party applying for a specification broader than its intended commercial activities can be found to have applied in bad faith.  The UKSC reversed the Court of Appeal on the approach in law, finding that Sky’s trade mark registrations had been sought partly in bad faith, and should be partially invalidated. The Court found infringement of the remaining specification by one of SkyKick’s products, but upheld the Court of Appeal’s finding that there was no infringement by the other. It also found that it enjoyed a continuing jurisdiction to grant EU-wide relief given that these proceedings started before Brexit.  Here I will focus on the part of the judgment about invalidity for bad faith. I will introduce what the Court has decided and its reasons, and then look at three questions: (i) to what extent does this judgment advance the law of invalidity for applying in bad faith?; (ii) is there now a difference between the extent of goods/services for which you can register your mark, and those for which you can enforce it?; and (iii) is this judgment likely to change applicants’ approach to drafting their specifications?

Biography: Dr Stuart Baran is a barrister at specialist intellectual property chambers Three New Square IP. After a degree in chemistry and doctorate in chemical physics, each at Oxford, he was called to the Bar in 2011 and has practised from Three New Square ever since, in all areas of IP but with particular emphases on trade marks and patents. Stuart was lucky to chair the Oxford International IP Moot for several years, starting during his DPhil.  As a barrister, Stuart has appeared unled in every IP forum, from the UKIPO and European Patent Office to the EU General Court and Court of Justice as well as the UK High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. He has been involved in a number of seminal cases across the IP spectrum, including Actavis v. Lilly, Newron v. Comptroller-General, Sky v. SkyKick, and Thaler v. Comptroller-General.  Alongside his private practice, Stuart is Standing Counsel to the Comptroller-General which means he represents and advises the UKIPO and government departments on intellectual property issues. He was awarded Legal 500 Junior of the Year for IP in 2018; Managing IP Junior of the Year in 2021 and 2024; and was profiled as a JUVE Patent “One to Watch” in 2023. Outside of work he is a keen orchestral violinist, cook and Italophile.

For more information see:

https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

Feminist activists, country representatives, and other civil society actors have debated how to define “gender” in international criminal law (ICL) for at least three decades. In the Rome Conference that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its Statute in 1998, defining “gender” was a hotly debated topic of negotiation. More recently, this debate has resurfaced in the steps leading to the International Law Commission’s Draft Articles for a Crimes Against Humanity Treaty, and continues to be discussed in the deliberations at the Sixth Committee on the Draft Articles. The CAH Convention is now expected to be negotiated between 2026-2029, and, more than a mere point of contention, the concept of ‘gender’ in its text can be crucial for prosecuting sexual and gender-based international crimes and thus fundamental to gender justice efforts worldwide. With this in mind, this roundtable gathers scholars and activists studying and working (often simultaneously) on the definition of gender in international criminal law, in an effort to learn from their specific positionalities, perceptions, and experiences about the challenges, strategies, and possibilities for (non-)defining the term.

https://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/press/events/2025/02/panel-queering-gender-crimes-against-humanity-draft-possibilities-alliances-and-strategies

Sovereign debt crises have surged since the end of the Bretton Woods system and currently threaten a lost decade for many countries across the world. Indermit Gill, in the World Bank Group’s 2024 International Debt Report, describes the situation in many of the poorest countries as a ‘metastasising solvency crisis that continues to be misdiagnosed as a liquidity problem’. Despite their severe socioeconomic consequences, no comprehensive legal framework exists to address these crises—arguably the most significant gap in international economic law.

This lecture, based on Dr Karina Patrício Ferreira Lima’s forthcoming book Governing Sovereign Debt Crises: The Case for International Sovereign Insolvency Law (Hart Publishing), makes the case for creating such a mechanism under international law. The book challenges prevailing narratives that attribute sovereign debt crises solely to debtor states’ mismanagement or misfortunes, instead arguing that sovereign insolvency is a systemic feature of the international monetary system. Current solutions—voluntary, ad hoc, and fragmented—fail to equitably allocate losses across an increasingly diversified sovereign creditor base, leaving many creditors worse off. At the same time, debtor states and their populations remain vulnerable to macroeconomic crises and enduring austerity, which often lead to long-term economic stagnation.

The book adopts a legal political economy approach to illustrate how power asymmetries among stakeholders and the absence of enforceable rules perpetuate inefficiencies and inequities in resolving sovereign debt crises. Drawing on the legal theory of finance, insolvency law, and common resource governance theory, it illustrates how these governance failures result in a dual tragedy: a tragedy of the commons and a tragedy of the anticommons. The lecture will also examine the growing complexity of sovereign debt markets, including the diversification of creditor types, the erosion of ‘gentlemen’s agreements,’ and the limitations of initiatives like the Paris Club and the G20’s Common Framework for debt treatments. It concludes by arguing that only international sovereign insolvency rules can resolve the delays, inefficiencies, and inequities that plague sovereign debt restructuring, while exploring avenues for implementing such a proceeding and discussing the role of domestic law in a well-functioning international sovereign debt architecture.

Dr Karina Patrício Ferreira Lima is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the intersection of law, finance, and sovereign debt within the broader context of global economic governance. Her research portfolio covers the legal governance of sovereign debt crises, the law and policy of international financial institutions, and the macroeconomic impact of financial law and regulation.

Dr Patrício advises public entities, NGOs, and leading law firms on various aspects of financial and monetary law, including sovereign debt restructuring, financial regulation, and the governance of international financial institutions. Her work has been recognised with prestigious awards, including the 2022 Society of International Economic Law-Hart Prize and the 2022 John H. Jackson Prize, conferred by the Journal of International Economic Law. She also serves as a peer reviewer for top law and social sciences journals globally.

Oh Thursday 6th February 2025 Professor Campbell McLachlan KC delivered his 1973 Professor Inaugural Lecture: 'On the Interface between Public and Private International Law'.

The lecture begins at 05:18

Abstract: Our understanding of the operation of law beyond the nation State has been deeply shaped by two great disciplines: public and private international law. Yet surprisingly little systematic attention has been devoted to the relationship between the two. In his inaugural lecture as Professor of International Dispute Resolution in the University of Cambridge, McLachlan argues that the neglect of this interface is highly consequential for our understanding of law’s capacity to control the State and the corporation, which are, respectively, the principal holders of public/political and private/economic power in the world.

Campbell McLachlan is elected as Professor of Law (1973) in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He took up his chair in July 2024, specialising in International Dispute Resolution. A New Zealander, his career has spanned scholarship and practice in private and public international law. His principal works include: Foreign Relations Law (CUP 2014), International Investment Arbitration: Substantive Principles (2nd ed, OUP 2017) and The Principle of Systemic Integration in International Law (2024). He is a Specialist Editor of Dicey, Morris & Collins on the Conflict of Laws. He gave the General Course at The Hague Academy of International Law in January 2024. He is a member of the Institut de Droit International and of the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

Photographs of the event are available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cambridgelawfaculty/albums/72177720323668326

Speaker: Professor Orla Lynskey, University College London

Abstract: The EU ‘digital empire’ seeks to align technological development to its rights and values by adopting and promoting a rights-driven model of technological regulation. Bradford’s influential characterisation of EU digital strategy is credible when one maps the array of legal ‘Acts’ applicable to data, digital markets, digital services and AI adopted by the EU in recent years, all of which are without prejudice to the EU data protection law. Yet, when one delves deeper, the EU’s commitment to rights-based regulation of the digital sphere is not iron-clad. Rather, as we demonstrate through an empirical analysis of the European Commission’s adequacy decisions over a quarter of a century (1999-2024), there are clear divergences amongst EU institutions about the balance to be struck between fundamental rights and economic interests. Such divergence suggest the EU might more accurately be characterised as an amalgamation of fiefdoms rather than an empire. This inter-institutional dynamic is relevant to the legitimacy of EU actions in the digital sphere and may foreshadow the future direction of EU data law.

For more information see:

https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series