Professor Susan Marks

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course is part of the following LLM specialism: Public International Law.

This course has a limited number of places and we cannot guarantee all students will get a place.

There are no formal prerequisites. 

This course is primarily designed for students who have already had some exposure to public international law and wish to deepen their understanding of the international legal dimensions of contemporary problems. Each week the relation will be explored between international law and a different global issue or theme, such as war, poverty, terrorism, humanity, and territory. Course readings will encompass both legal scholarship and relevant writing by scholars from other disciplines (geography, anthropology, philosophy, literary studies, etc.).

This course will have two hours of teaching content each week in Michaelmas Term, either in the form of a two hour seminar or an online lecture and one hour class. There will be a Reading Week in Week 6 of Michaelmas Term.

Students are expected to have done the set reading and be willing to participate in discussion.

Class exercises will be set.

Reading lists will be provided for each seminar on Moodle. Relevant readings are likely to include: David Kennedy, Of War and Law; Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality; and Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance.

Assessment will be based on submission of an 8,000 word essay.