Dr Margot Salomon

Additional Teachers: Dr Oliver Hailes, Dr Mona Paulsen, Dr Marie Petersmann

This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law, BSc in Environmental Policy with Economics, BSc in International Relations and LLB in Laws. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

Students must have completed Public International Law (LL279).

LL279 Public International Law is a prerequisite for and will be complemented by LL280 Advanced Issues in Public International Law.

In this advanced-level course, we build on Public International Law by considering how the concepts and structuring ideas explored in that course give rise to and organise work in a number of specialised fields of international law. We are interested in understanding how those fields and their associated institutions function, with a keen focus on the particular legal ordering – categories, inclusions and exclusions – they create. We will begin with an introduction to the course, by the teaching team, exploring how international law works in the world, and, in making explicit the terms of legal ordering across the fields, expose what kinds of politics, protections and wrongs they make possible. Our first case study will then follow: feminist approaches to international law will allow us to interrogate the boundaries, assumptions, and beneficiaries set by the international legal system and we’ll do so by considering a range of fields including peace and security, international humanitarian law and international human rights law. From there, the course will dedicate two weeks to the study of a chosen field of international law, starting with a detailed lecture on the law and architecture of that field followed by a cutting-edge case study that engages explicitly with its complexities of legal ordering.

We begin our coverage of specific areas of international law with a focus on International Environmental Law, followed by a case study on the Rights of Nature and the turn to centring ecosystems as bearers of legal rights. We will then study the field of International Investment Law before delving into a case study on seabed mining, impacts on the marine environment and local communities, and the plurality of interests and norms that are engaged by investment treaty disputes. From there, we take a deep dive into the field of International Trade Law to understand theories of free trade and the core World Trade Organization principles and rules before unpacking, through the case study, the first ever use of security exceptions to justify WTO-inconsistent trade measures in a case brought by Ukraine against Russia. The next field we’ll want to understand is International Human Rights Law, internationally and regionally. Our case study here explores how law conditions our political and economic order and how the recent UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants to seeds, food sovereignty, decommodification, and economic democracy attempts to reorder international law.

This course will have a minimum of two hours of teaching content each week in Winter Term. This course includes a reading week.

One formative essay.

Reading assignments are provided for each seminar on Moodle and draw from various primary and secondary source materials. Some other works to which you may wish to refer include: H. Charlesworth and C. Chinkin, The Boundaries of International Law; J. Klabbers, International Law ; J.T. Gathii and N. Tzouvala, ‘Racial Capitalism and International Economic Law: Introduction’ 25 Journal of International Economic Law 2 (2022).

Exam (100%, duration: 2 hours and 30 minutes) in the spring exam period.