Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Lecture Summary: The survival of our planet requires swift and targeted climate policies to adapt, mitigate and repair. Scientists and political elites acknowledge the urgency to reduce our reliance on coal and fossil fuels to achieve the necessary reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Academics have been studying the impacts of investment treaty protections on climate action and argued that investment treaties raise the cost of climate action, financially and via regulatory chill and limit their ability to combat climate change. There also have been instances where investment treaties protected investors in the renewable energy sector leading to the argument that international investment law can support transition to renewable energy. This lecture will reflect on the compatibility of states’ existing investment treaty obligations with their climate obligations. It will consider the consequences of investment law’s distaste of local politics, stakeholder participation and public protest, which are essential to the realization of the right to a healthy environment, climate policy-making, and more broadly to democratic governance.

Anil is a Senior Lecturer at Essex Law School and a co-director of the Essex Business and Human Rights Project. Her research interests are in the fields of international investment law and business and human rights. Her research bridges the gap between corporate law, international investment law, human rights law, and tort law, examining how these areas can and should interact to operationalise human rights standards in the modern business context. She has published works on parent-subsidiary relationships in the business and human rights context, non-financial reporting, duty of care in supply chain relationships, human rights in investment contracts and the embedded inequalities in the investment treaty regime. She is the author of The Nationality of Corporate Investors under International Investment Law (2020, Hart Publishing), a member of the IEL Collective’s steering committee and a member of Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum’s governance committee.

Speaker: Professor Jorge Feliu Rey (University Carlos III of Madrid)

Commentator: Professor Hugh Beale (University of Warwick)

Held in collaboration with CPLC.

3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners. The Cambridge Private Law Centre acknowledges with gratitude the generous financial support of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP and of South Square.

Speaker: Professor Jorge Feliu Rey (University Carlos III of Madrid)

Commentator: Professor Hugh Beale (University of Warwick)

Held in collaboration with CPLC.

3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners. The Cambridge Private Law Centre acknowledges with gratitude the generous financial support of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP and of South Square.

Lecture summary: United Nations (UN) and several UN Agencies have started to use behavioural sciences in order to achieve their policy goals, including for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). While it is to be appreciated that insights on actual behavior inform policy making of international actors, they raise scientific and normative considerations warranting caution. First, for those considerations it matters, who the acting and the targeted actors are, that is, where and for what behavioral sciences are used (inter-state or targeting citizens). Behavioural interventions come in many facets and warrant a differentiated view – a finely built roadmap is thus desirable. Second, there are concerns about the internal and external validity of experimental research on which behavioural sciences largely, but not solely, draws. Third, taking a differentiated view on behavioral sciences also allows for a more finely grained view on normative concerns underlying the operations of the United Nations. This contribution spells out those considerations while still advocating for the approach as such.

Reading material: https://www.uninnovation.network/assets/BeSci/UN_Behavioural_Science_Report_2021.pdf

Anne van Aaken (Dr. iur. and MA Economics) is Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Law and Economics, Legal Theory, Public International Law and European Law and Director of the Institute of Law and Economics, University of Hamburg. She was Vice-President of the European Society of International Law and is Chair of the European University Institute Research Council. She is a general editor of Journal of International Dispute Settlement and a member of the editorial boards of AJIL, the Journal of International Economic Law, International Theory, and EJIL (until 2021). She was a guest professor in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the USA (Global Law Professor at NYU and Columbia). She has been expert consultant for the IBRD, UNCTAD, GIZ, OECD and the UN High Level Advisory Board of Effective Multilateralism. Her research focuses on international (economic) law, international governance, behavioral economics/psychology and international legal theory. She has published widely on those topics.

Lecture summary: It is alleged that the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) embodied the victory of Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice’s preference to interpret treaties based on the “ordinary meaning of the words” over Sir Hersh Lauterpacht’s view that one instead should seek to ascertain the treaty parties’ “actual intentions.” But is that so? If, as VCLT Article 31(1) provides, the focus is to be on “the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in the light of its object and purpose,” and if that “ordinary meaning” is not, as per Article 32, “ambiguous,” “obscure,” “manifestly absurd or unreasonable,” then why should resort to “Supplementary Means of Interpretation” be appropriate at all “in order to confirm the meaning resulting from the application of article 31”? If, as many believe, the VCLT is hierarchical, shouldn’t interpretation be complete when an “ordinary meaning” is established that is “unambiguous,” not “obscure,” and “neither manifestly absurd or unreasonable”? Did those preferring to determine the treaty parties “actual intentions” in fact sneak into the VLCT’s text that provision for supplementary “confirmation” of a clear “ordinary meaning”? Is to that extent the VCLT in fact, as is said of treaties generally, “an agreement to disagree”? In reality, given the sequential submissions in international arbitrations, as well as before international courts and tribunals, each party, beginning with the Applicant’s or Claimant’s Memorial, followed by Respondent’s Counter-Memorial, the Reply Memorial etc., from the start places before the adjudicator all of its arguments under Section 3. of the VCLT (Articles 31-33).

The fact that Article 31’s “General Rule Of Interpretation” and Article 32’s “Supplementary Means Of Interpretation” are presented to the adjudicator as a unit, and not seriatim, has resulted in some arbitral tribunals not treating those two articles of the VCLT as being hierarchical, and instead applying what has become known as the “crucible approach,” i.e., stirring the two in the pot of deliberations as though they were a regulatory potpourri rather than distinct rules, the later to be applied only if the first did not produce an unchallengable “ordinary meaning.” Thus separate approaches to the VCLT have arisen that have raised the question posed by former ICJ President Schwebel: “May Preparatory Work Be Used to Correct Rather Than Confirm the ‘Clear’ Meaning of a Treaty Provision?”

Judge Charles N Brower’s career has been divided between private law practice, first with White & Case LLP in New York City and Washington, D.C., since 2001 as an Arbitrator Member of Twenty Essex Chambers in London, and public service, first with the Office of The Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State (1969-73)(successively as Assistant Legal Adviser for European Affairs, Deputy Legal Adviser and Acting Legal Adviser), as Judge of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal (1983-present), as sub-Cabinet rank Deputy Special Counsellor to the President of the United States dealing with the Iran-Contra affair (1987), as Judge ad hoc of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (1999-2002)(appointed by Bolivia), and the most -appointed of the only five Americans ever to be appointed Judge ad hoc of the International Court of Justice (2014-2022) (appointed by Colombia (1 case) and the United States (2 cases)).

Judge Brower's book: 'Judging Iran: A Memoir of The Hague, The White House, and Life on the Front Line of International Justice' is available now to pre-order and will be released on 11 April 2023.

Professor Campbell McLachlan KC delivered the Goodhart Lecture on Monday 6 February 2023 at the Faculty of Law on the topic 'The legal science of the international'.

Professor Campbell McLachlan was the 2022-23 Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science in the University of Cambridge and a visiting fellow of Trinity Hall. He is Professor of Law at Victoria University of Wellington; a member of the Institut de Droit International and of the Permanent Court of Arbitration; and an associate member of Essex Court Chambers, London.

Professor McLachlan asks what light the idea of law as a science can shed on the capacity of international law to respond to the many disintegrative pressures that it faces.

The lecture begins at 02:43

For information about the Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professorship in Legal Science see https://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent-scholars-archive/arthur-goodhart-visiting-professor-legal-science

Lecture summary: After 1945, the United Nations – and international organizations (IOs) more generally – were widely embraced as the ideal, democratic means to resolve international conflicts and promote global welfare. Sharing this almost feverish enthusiasm, a Western-controlled International Court of Justice adopted a deferential attitude toward IOs. The law it developed exuded confidence in the impartiality of IOs, premised on an unquestioning assumption that their subjection to legal discipline and judicial review would be unnecessary and even counterproductive. I propose that the time has come to concede that the utopian premises upon which the international law relating to IOs is based are flawed and outline a new course for the international law on IOs, one that addresses the inherent flaws of collective decision-making and can assist IOs to achieve their stated goals.

Professor Eyal Benvenisti is Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law, Columbia Law School (2022). He is the Whewell Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge, CC Ng Fellow in Law at Jesus College, and the Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member of the Global Visiting Faculty of New York University School of Law. He is Member of the Institut de droit international and of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities. A Co-Editor of the British Yearbook of International Law, he served on the Editorial Board of the American Journal of International Law (2009-18). He was Project Director of the “GlobalTrust – Sovereigns as Trustees of Humanity” research project, funded by an ERC Advanced Grant (2013-18). He previously was a Visiting Professor at the law schools at Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Toronto and Yale. He gave special courses at The Hague Academy of International Law (2013) and the Xiamen Academy of International Law (2017). Benvenisti will deliver the General Course in International Law at The Hague Academy of International Law in 2024.

Lecture summary: It is widely recognised that there is a dearth of women judges sitting on international courts and tribunals. In this lecture, particular attention will be paid to the question of why the lack of judicial parity matters. It will be argued that the dearth of women judges is both symptom and cause of the highly gendered way in which international law and international institutions operate. The idea of the totemic judge of international law whose male gender is rendered invisible and unremarked and who functions to enrobe the gendered norms and institutions of international law will be called forth. The female judge, conversely, is presented as a disruptive force whose very presence serves to place gender in the frame. Drawing on accounts from international courts and from the Feminist Judgments in International Law project, it will be concluded that an approach to judging that acknowledges and challenges structures of power – including gender – contains considerable transformative potential.

Dr Loveday Hodson is Associate Professor at the University of Leicester.

I joined Leicester Law School in 2004, since which time I have had a number of teaching and administrative roles. For the past few years I have taught on the International Law undergraduate module as well as convening the Feminist Perspectives on International Law and Legal Responses to Global Injustice postgraduate modules. During my time at Leicester I also contribute to the teaching of Constitutional and Administrative Law. I am currently the School's Deputy PRG Tutor (admissions) and Research Ethics Officer.

Speaker: Jade Kouletakis, Abertay University, Dundee

Biography: Jade is currently a lecturer at Albertay University Law School.

Abstract: International intellectual property frameworks conceive of copyright exclusivity as a largely individualistic, westernised and capitalistic benefit which must be balanced against and limited by the non-commercial, competing public interest. This is expressed primarily by way of limitations to and exceptions from the norm of exclusivity recognised within these frameworks. This presentation argues for an alternative interpretation of copyright exclusivity as being justified by the public interest. However, unlike the works of Geiger et al., this interpretation is not premised upon the constitutional and quasi-constitutional patterns accounting for the public interest foundations of IP. Instead, it is premised upon the conceptualisations of indigenous communities within the Global South relating to exclusivity over intangible property for the communal benefit. This presentation argues that a paradigm shift in the international community at a supranational level is needed in order to better reflect the norms and values of the Global South. By reassessing the nature of copyright exclusivity rather than delegating conversations about non-commercial communal needs to limitations and exceptions, the Global South is no longer seen as mere passive receptors of Western norms and values, but as active participants with inherent value in the creation of a truly global IP framework.

For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars