Art, Architecture and International Law seminar series: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
The Art, Architecture and International Law seminar series was launched in the academic year 2020/2021. The series is designed to bridge the worlds of art, architecture and international law. It explores the different ways in which art and architecture and international law intersect. It also demonstrates that international law exists well beyond the written word.
Lecture summary: As the future of international law has become a growing site of struggle within and between powerful states, debates over the history of international law have become increasingly heated. In this lecture discussing her new book 'International Law and the Politics of History', Anne Orford explores the ideological, political, and material stakes of apparently technical disputes over how the legal past should be studied and understood. Drawing on a deep knowledge of the history, theory, and practice of international law, she argues that there can be no impartial accounts of international law's past and its relation to empire and capitalism. Rather than looking to history in a doomed attempt to find a new ground for formalist interpretations of what past legal texts really mean or what international regimes are really for, she urges lawyers and historians to embrace the creative role they play in making rather than finding the meaning of international law.
Anne Orford is Melbourne Laureate Professor and Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law at Melbourne Law School, and Visiting Professor of Law and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer in World Organizations at Harvard Law School. She researches and teaches in the areas of international law, history and theory of international law, international dispute settlement, international economic law, and climate change. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a past President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. Her publications include International Law and the Politics of History (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Pensée Critique et Pratique du Droit International (Pedone, 2020), International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Reading Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and the edited collections Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917 (Cambridge University Press, 2021) (co-editor), The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2016) (co-editor), and International Law and its Others (Cambridge University Press, 2006). She presented a special course on Civil War and the Transformation of International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law in 2021. She has been awarded honorary doctorates in law by Lund University, the University of Gothenburg, and the University of Helsinki, and the Woodward Medal for Excellence in Humanities and Social Sciences by the University of Melbourne.
Lecture summary: Dissent has a long and controversial history in international adjudication. This lecture excavates a now-forgotten history of debate over dissent, and identifies competing claims regarding dissent’s effect on judicial legitimacy, independence, and legal doctrine. To evaluate these claims, I undertake a comparative study of dissent practices across three leading international tribunals, the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, and the European Court of Justice. Surprisingly, this comparative inquiry reveals that that each of the central claims in long-standing debates over dissent at international courts is misleading – and each in a different way. Challenging conventional wisdom, we find that the presence of dissenting opinions has little systematic impact on legitimacy; the key factor instead is patterns of dissent that suggest geopolitical bias among international judges. Turning to independence, we find that the effects of dissent on judicial independence are mediated by a third factor, namely the length and renewability of judicial terms of office, which vary across international courts. Finally, turning to legal doctrine, we find considerable support for the view that dissents promote the dynamic development of law, but at best limited support for the more heroic claim that today’s dissents form the basis for future majority rulings.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, international courts proliferated and scholars could meaningfully speak of the judicialization of international relations. But international adjudication is currently under severe challenge, placing pressure on international courts’ ability to maintain authority within larger systems of global governance. In this context, the success of efforts to maintain and enhance the legitimacy of international courts, independence of their judges, and quality of their doctrine, may well determine the future of international adjudication. More accurately understanding dissent’s impact can substantially advance those efforts.
Additional information
Jeffrey L. Dunoff is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law. His research focuses on public international law, international regulatory regimes, international courts, and interdisciplinary approaches to international law. Among other activities, he has served as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and Princeton University’s School for Public and International Affairs; a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute; a Senior Fellow at Humboldt University; and a Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Research Centre at Cambridge University. Professor Dunoff’s publications include International Legal Theory: Foundations and Frontiers (coeditor, with Mark A. Pollack, forthcoming CUP 2022); International Law; Norms, Actors, Process (with Monica Hakimi, Steve Ratner & David Wippman, 5th edition 2020), a leading textbook; Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations (coeditor, with Mark A. Pollack, CUP 2013); and Ruling the World? Constitutionalism, International Law and Global Governance (coeditor, with Joel P. Trachtman, CUP 2009).
This lecture is is part of the Art, Architecture and International Law seminar series which is being launched this academic year. The series is designed to bridge the worlds of art, architecture and international law. It explores the different ways in which art and architecture and international law intersect. It also demonstrates that international law exists well beyond the written word.
Lecture summary: At the heart of this lecture is the question of how music could serve as an effective instrumental tool for rethinking the theoretical and processual dimensions of international law in Africa. This lecture argues that socially conscious songs provide a beneficial lens/gateway to the popular understanding of the problematics of international law. As Daniel Newman rightly noted, “the use of popular music offers a writer a valuable device to render what could be quite dry and, otherwise dull, argument suddenly more interesting and thus engaging to the reader”. Such knowledge further engenders the possibility of repurposing the applicative dimensions of international law on the continent.
Babatunde Fagbayibo is a Professor in Law at the University of South Africa. He graduated with a doctoral degree in Public Law, with specialisation in regional integration law, from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His research interests include supranational regionalism, transnational policy analysis, critical approaches to international law, and governance and democratisation in Africa. His writings have been published in several academic journals, as chapters in books, and on other online platforms. In 2014, he was recognised by the Young People in International Affairs (YPIA) as one of the top 35 Africans under the age of 35 for his research in the field of supranational regionalism in Africa. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Southern African Public Law Journal (SAPL) and is on the editorial boards of the African Journal of Democracy and Governance (RADG) and the Nigerian Yearbook of International Law (NYIL).
Lecture summary: Visual international law tells stories. Image and art supporting imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also projected the authority, legitimacy, and universality of international law. This lecture argues that depictions of treaty-making, international legal theorists, and conferences were about painting European international law as ‘successful’—telling stories of an authoritative, universal, and virtue-laden mode of international regulation. That same approach also stretched into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including through the physical construction of international law in the architecture of its statement buildings, such as the International Court of Justice.
Dr Kate Miles is a Fellow, Lecturer and Director of Studies in Law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She is also a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge. She is the author of a monograph published by Cambridge University Press: The Origins of International Investment Law: Empire, Environment and the Safeguarding of Capital. She is also the author of a forthcoming monograph also with Cambridge University Press: Visual International Law: Image, Symbol, Art and Architecture.
As an undergraduate in law and arts at the University of Auckland, she studied law, art history, philosophy and ancient history. She holds a B.A. in Art History, LL.B., and an LL.M. in Environmental Law (Hons I) from the University of Auckland, an LL.M. in International Legal Studies from NYU School of Law, and a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney. Since 2015, her research has drawn together those interdisciplinary threads and engaged with the visuality of international law. In particular, it has focused on the role of the visual in projecting the authority, legitimacy and universality of imperial international law.