2009 Events
- 11-12 December 2009: CERDIN/IILAH Workshop, Evaluating Critical Approaches to International Law, Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne)
- 19 November 2009: IILAH/CCCS Seminar, Women's Autonomy: Religion on Trial, presented by Professor Frances Raday
- 9-10 November 2009: IILAH/ARC Workshop, Reasons of State: Security, Civility, Immunity, Life, Melbourne Law School
- 28 October 2009: IILAH Symposium, Interregnums: Between the National and the Post-National, held at the Melbourne Law School
- 7 September 2009: The Court as Archive Project Workshop, presented by Dr Ann Genovese
- 20 August 2009: IILAH Public Seminar, Multilateralism as Terror: International Law, Haiti and Imperialism, presented by Dr China Miéville
- 17 August 2009: The Role of the WTO in Protecting the Global Commons - is there scope for Unilateral Environmental Measures? presented by Ms Jo Feldman
- 10 August 2009: Asian Law Centre and IILAH: Enforcement Problem in the WTO - Success, Limitations and possible Improvement presented by Professor Yasuhei Taniguchi (Sydney Law School) held at the Melbourne Law School
- 5 August 2009 and 9 September 2009: Global Justice Centre and IILAH Film Nights held at the Melbourne Law School
- 28 July 2009: IILAH Lunch-time Seminar, From Security Council Resolution 1325 to 1820, presented by Ms Gina Heathcote (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)
- 22 July 2008: IILAH Workshop, National Human Rights Institutions Workshop: Creating change? NHRIs’ (In)Action in the Asia-Pacific Region
- 15 July 2009: IILAH Seminar, International Law and Translation: Overcoming Legal Pluralism and Linguistic Diversity, presented by Sieglinde E. Pommer (Harvard Law School)
- 26-27 June 2009: Regime Interaction in International Law: Theoretical and Practical Challenges, (Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and Pembroke College, Cambridge)
- 3 June 2009: IILAH Seminar, Transnational Law and Transnational Legal Pluralism: Methodological Observations, presented by Professor Peer Zumbansen (Osgoode Hall Law School, York University)
- 29 April 2009: IILAH Seminar, Situational Gravity Under the Rome Statute, presented by Kevin Jon Heller (Melbourne Law School)
- 2 April 2009: IILAH Seminar, Safety standards and indigenous products: what role for traditional knowledge?, presented by Ms Meredith Kolsky Lewis (Victoria University of Wellington Law School)
- 25 March 2009: IILAH Seminar, State Building and International Law: Problems, Paradigms and Prospects, presented by Professor Antony Anghie (University of Utah)
- 17 March 2009: IILAH Seminar, WTO Dispute Settlement: Recent Australian Experience, presented by Ms Amanda Gorley (DFAT)
- 24 February 2009: PhD Completion Seminar, Hosted by IILAH, Recognition, Redistribution and Resistance: Assessing the Usefulness of the Right to Health in Sub-Saharan Africa, presented by Mr Daniel Muriu (Melbourne Law School)
- 21 January 2009: IILAH Day-time Seminar, The Regulation of Female Nudity in Public Spaces: Why are Breasts Such a Threat?, presented by Ms Chantal Morton (Osgoode Hall Law School)
11-12 December 2009: CERDIN/IILAH Workshop, Evaluating Critical Approaches to International Law, Université Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne)
(Convenors: Professor Emmanuelle Jouannet (CERDIN) and Professor Anne Orford (IILAH))
This two-day workshop will reflect upon the contributions and limitations of critical approaches to international law developed over the past twenty years in the work of Anglophone scholars. The workshop will be organised around four roundtables, exploring critical approaches and political conceptions of international law, critical approaches and human rights, critical approaches and the Third World and critical approaches and the history of international law.
Contact details:
IILAH Administrator (IILAH, University of Melbourne) : law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
Ms Stéphanie Millan (CERDIN, Université Paris I) : cerdin@univ-paris1.fr
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19 November 2009: IILAH/CCCS Seminar, Women's Autonomy: Religion on Trial, presented by Professor Frances Raday
The Institute for International Law and the Humanities and the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies present a seminar by Professor Frances Raday on Women’s Autonomy - Religion on Trial
Abstract Each of the monotheistic religions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - restricts women’s autonomy. Multi-culturalist and anti-secular critiques within the human rights literature have ignored or marginalised the impact of organised religion on women. The Human Rights Council’s “traditional values” resolution in October 2009 has injected this marginalisation of women’s harm into the United Nations human rights machinery.
In this seminar Professor Raday will examine various ways in which women have perceived and formulated their claims to constitutional protection for their human rights as regards the patriarchal restrictions of religion. The selected issues will be abortion, women’s religious identity claims and the veil.
Professor Frances Raday is Lieberman Chair in Labour Law at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and Expert Member for the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (2001-2003)
Event details:
Date: Thursday 19 November 2009
Venue: Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne
Contact details:
IILAH Administrator
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
(03) 8344 6589
9-10 November 2009: IILAH/ARC Workshop, Reasons of State: Security, Civility, Immunity, Life, Melbourne Law School
(Convenor: Professor Anne Orford)
IILAH hosted a two-day workshop exploring the histories, objects, passions and strategies of modern statecraft. Speakers included:
Hilary Charlesworth (RegNet, ANU), Michael Dillon (Politics, Lancaster), Ian Duncanson (Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne), Luis Eslava (Law, Melbourne), Ann Genovese (Law, Melbourne), Lee Godden (Law, Melbourne), Graham Hammill (English, Buffalo), Mickaël Ho Foui Sang (Law, Melbourne and Paris X), Martti Koskenniemi (Law, Helsinki/NYU), Jacques Lezra (Comparative Literature, NYU), Philip Lorenz (English, Cornell), Shaun McVeigh (Law, Melbourne), Yoriko Otomo (Law, Melbourne), Robert Wai (Law, Osgoode) and Eric Wilson (Law, Monash). The workshop description is available here. That description draws on a short article published at this link.
Click here for the workshop programme
This workshop is funded by the Australian Research Council as part of a five-year Discovery Project on Cosmopolitanism and the Future of International Law.
Event details:
Date: 9-10 November 2009
Venue: Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne
Contact details:
IILAH Administrator
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
(03) 8344 6589
28 October 2009: IILAH Symposium, Interregnums: Between the National and the Post-National, Melbourne Law School
(Convenor: Dr Ann Genovese)
The Institute for International Law and the Humanities hosted a one-day symposium entitled Interregnums: Between the National and the Post-National. A key question for the symposium is: from the perspective of the Left can nation states offer space for political or revolutionary projects? In exploring this very broad question, others of course arise, please read the attached document here, for a detailed overview of the symposium. Presenters include:
Ann Curthoys (Manning Clark Professor of History (ANU)); John Docker (University of Sydney); Maria Drakopoulou (Kent Law School, UK); Ann Genovese (IILAH, Melbourne Law School); Lia Kent (PhD, Melbourne Law School); Vera Mackie (Historical Studies, University of Melbourne); Anne Orford (IILAH, Melbourne Law School).
This symposium is funded by the Australian Research Council.
Event details:
Date: 28 October 2009
Venue: Melbourne Law School
Contact details:
IILAH Administrator
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
(03) 8344 6589
7 September 2009: The Court as Archive Project Workshop, presented by Dr Ann Genovese
Event details:
Date: Monday, 7 September 2009
Venue: 185 Pelham Street Carlton - Melbourne Law School
20 August 2009: IILAH Public Seminar, Multilateralism as Terror: International Law, Haiti and Imperialism presented by Dr China Miéville
(Convenor: Professor Anne Orford)
Abstract: Much of the liberal criticism of the Bush administration's prosecution of the war in Iraq has taken a legalistic form, decrying that law as 'illegal'. This criticism has often implied that US unilateralism has been definitional to the neoconservative project and the geopolitical moment, and that a contrasting and supposedly non-existent 'multilateralism' would be neither illegal nor objectionable. The overthrow of Haiti's President Jean-Bertrande Aristide in 2004 and the subsequent installing of UN MINUSTAH peace-keepers in the country was a model multilateral action, the fact of which should have problematised this model: its almost wholesale ignoring in the scholarly international law literature is therefore investigated. The intervention is understood as a successful imperialist action, and the argument made that multilateralism as much as unilateralism can easily be part of an imperialist strategy.
Dr China Miéville is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, School of Law, and is on the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism. He is the author of Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, and various essays on international law, politics and theory. Dr Miéville appears courtesy of the Melbourne Writers Festival.
You may download the flyer on this link.
Click here for a PDF of the Seminar.
Event details:
Date: Thursday, 20 August 2009
Venue: 185 Pelham Street Carlton - Melbourne Law School
Contact details:
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
17 August 2009: The Role of the WTO in Protecting the Global Commons - is there scope for Unilateral Environmental Measures? presented by Ms Jo Feldman (Legal Research Officer at the Office of International Law)
(Convenor: Dr Margaret Young)
Ms Jo Feldman is a Senior Legal Officer in the Trade section of the Office of International Law in the Attorney-General’s Department. Prior to joining the department in 2007, Jo practised as a barrister and solicitor at the State Solicitor’s Office, Western Australia. Since joining the Attorney-General’s Department, Jo has been a legal advisor on several free trade agreements, including the Australia-Korea Free Trade Agreement and the Australia-China Free Trade Agreement. She has also provided advice on Australia’s obligations under the WTO Agreements and assisted in the drafting of Australia’s third party submissions to various WTO disputes.
Event details:
Date: Monday, 17 August 2009
Venue: 185 Pelham Street Carlton - Melbourne Law School
Click here to download the event flyer
Contact details:
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
10 August 2009: Asian Law Centre and IILAH: Enforcement Problem in the WTO - Success, Limitations and possible Improvement presented by Professor Yasuhei Taniguchi (Sydney Law School)
The rate of compliance with WTO reports is reported to be between 80% and 90% which is widely accepted as a success. There are, however, several infamous cases in which compliance has been delayed for a very long time. Therefore, the WTO dispute settlement system is widely recognised as incomplete in respect to compliance. WTO relief is not retroactive and, therefore, there is no incentive for early compliance except for informal pressure from the international community. Because a “recommendation/ruling” is usually general (not specific as allowed under DSU 19), disputes tend to continue about the existence of compliance.
Even non-compliance has become clear; the ultimate relief by way of a retaliation is not only cumbersome, but also maybe ineffective and even detrimental. Various proposals have been made by academics to correct these shortcomings and discussed by the member states in the DSU review project. But the prospects are not very good. Is this the limit of an international organisation?
Professor Yasuhei Taniguchi is renowned world-wide for his expertise in insolvency law, civil procedure, arbitration and the World Trade Organisation. He has taught mainly at Kyoto University and advised on major law reform initiatives in Japan. He has arbitrated dozens of cross-border commercial disputes (especially under ICC Rules), was a judge on the WTO Appellate Body over 2000-7, and is currently working as Counsel for Matsuo & Kosugi (Tokyo). Professor Taniguchi is an ICCA Council member, President of the Japan Association of Arbitrators, a former Vice-President of the International Association of Procedural Law and a former President of the Japan Association of Civil Procedure. He has also advised the Sydney Centre of International Law, and is currently the distinguished ANJeL/CAPLUS Research Visitor at Sydney Law School.
Click here to download event flyer
Event details:
Date: Monday 10 August 2009
Venue: 185 Pelham Street Carlton - Melbourne Law School
Contact details:
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
5 August 2009 and 9 September 2009: Global Justice Centre and IILAH Film Nights
Series of film screenings held at the Melbourne Law School in Semester 2 2009.
Wednesday 5 August 2009 Darwin's Nightmare www.darwinsnightmare.com introduced by Margaret Young
Wednesday 9 September 2009 The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court www.pbs.org/pov/reckoning/ introduced by Kevin Heller
Event details:
Date: Wednesday 5 August 2009 and Wednesday 9 September 2009
Venue: 185 Pelham Street Carlton - Melbourne Law School
Contact details:
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
28 July 2009: IILAH Lunch-time Seminar, From Security Council Resolution 1325 to 1820, presented by Ms Gina Heathcote (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)
(Convenor: Professor Anne Orford)
SC Res 1325 (1st October, 2000) on Women, Peace and Security has been described as functioning foremost as a tool that feminist activism has centered around (Enloe,2004). In contrast, international institutions have been slow to pick up on the possible ramifications of 1325 and critical feminist scholarship has challenged the underlying framework of 1325 (Otto, 2006).In June 2008, the Security Council 'added' a second tool for the implementation of gender justice in post-conflict situations: Resolution 1820 (18th June, 2008). This paper looks at the different structures of the two Security Council resolutions; their limitations, their potential and the opportunities they present for feminist action.
The paper will focus on the discrepancy between the requirement of participation evident in Res 1325 and the framing of Res 1820 as a response to sexual violence. Does the latter Resolution function as a refinement of 1325, as a complementary tool or as a negation?
Ms Gina Heathcote lectures in Public International Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She is currently developing her doctoral research, on feminist approaches to the international law on the use of force, for publication. Her research interests include international feminist legal theories, international security structures and the role of law in the prohibition, authorisation and justification of violence.
Click here to download event flyer.
Event details:
Date: Tuesday, 28 July 2009
Venue: 185 Pelham Street Carlton - Melbourne Law School
Contact details:
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
22 July 2008: IILAH Workshop, National Human Rights Institutions Workshop: Creating change? NHRIs’ (In)Action in the Asia-Pacific Region
(Convenor: Professor Dianne Otto and Ms Meg Brodie)
The Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) and the Postgraduate Law Students Association (PLSA) invite you to attend the NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS INSTITUTIONS Workshop entitled Creating change? NHRIs’ (In)Action in the Asia-Pacific Region.
Confirmed speakers include practitioners and academics from across Australia, the region and beyond. Papers considering the achievements and challenges of NHRIs in Australia, East Timor, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Mongolia, India and China and other broad based regional NHRI initiatives will be delivered.
Abstract: Since the 1990s NHRIs have been promoted as a possible bridge between international human rights standards and their domestic implementation. The international community, through the UN, has seen these institutions as part of a long-term strategy to advance sustained human rights change. In the Asia-Pacific region, NHRIs have an important role to play in the absence of a regional human rights mechanism. As scholarship about the experiences of particular Asia-Pacific NHRIs develops, and in the context of practical efforts to found new institutions across the region and support existing ones, the NHRI Workshop presents an opportunity to further collective efforts in this area.
Please click here to download the NHRI workshop flyer and program.
Click here to download presenters abstracts and bios.
Please click here to download the NHRI Workshop Papers.
Event details:
Date: Tuesday, 22July 2009
Venue: 185 Pelham Street Carlton - Melbourne Law School
Contact details:
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
15 July 2009: IILAH Seminar, International Law and Translation: Overcoming Legal Pluralism and Linguistic Diversity, presented by Ms Sieglinde E. Pommer (Harvard Law School)
(Convenor: Professor Anne Orford)
Building the international rule of law in this era of globalization is the mighty challenge of the 21st century. Due to increasing internationalization, international legal discourse has become multilingual. Common knowledge of international law can only be achieved by crossing barriers of language, legal cultures, and institution which is effectuated by legal translation as a way of efficient and successful transmission of knowledge about law across legal cultural as well as linguistic boundaries.
The translation of law therefore plays an integral part in the interaction of legal systems in today’s highly interconnected world, where international lawyers and legal translators are confronted with the asymmetry of legal systems, the relativity of concepts, and have to deal with inconsistent categorizations and classifications.
Questioning how legal information is possibly altered by its transmission from one legal system and legal language to another and demonstrating how cultural embeddedness conditions this presentation discusses legal translation as an increasingly important form of intercultural communication and highlights the significance of comparative legal insights for bridging legal cultural gaps.
Sieglinde E. Pommer is currently Post-doc Fellow and Lecturer at Harvard. A member of the New York Bar, Sieglinde holds doctoral degrees in law and philosophy from Vienna, an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School, and the Diplôme Supérieur de Droit Comparé from Strasbourg. After internships at the European Court of Justice and United Nations, she was awarded visiting scholarships at Oxford, Geneva, and McGill. Since 2007, Sieglinde has been serving as Secretary General of the European Society for Translation Studies; her dissertation on the complex relationship of comparative law and legal translation won the Figdor Prize 2006 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Event details:
Date: Wednesday, 15 July 2009
Venue: 185 Pelham Street Carlton - Melbourne Law School
Contact details:
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
26-27 June 2009: Regime Interaction in International Law: Theoretical and Practical Challenges, (Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and Pembroke College, Cambridge)
(Convenor: Dr Margaret Young)
Confirmed speakers are:
Georges Abi-Saab (formerly Appellate Body, World Trade Organisation), James Crawford (University of Cambridge), Jeff Dunoff (Temple University), James Flett (European Commission), Francoise Hampson (University of Essex), Stephen Humphreys (International Council on Human Rights Policy), David Kennedy (Brown University), Martti Koskenniemi (University of Helsinki), Andrew Lang (London School of Economics), Nele Matz-Luck (Max-Planck-Institute, Heidelberg), Sol Picciotto (Lancaster University Law School), Cheryl Saunders (University of Melbourne), Joanne Scott (University College London), Eleanor Sharpston (European Court of Justice), Gunther Teubner (University of Frankfurt/Main), Margaret Young (Convenor, University of Melbourne)
This conference is co-sponsored by IILAH and the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and Pembroke College (Cambridge).
Download Conference Programme.
Event details:
Date: 26-27 June 2009
Venue: Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and Pembroke College (Cambridge)
Contact details:
Dr Margaret Young
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
3 June 2009: IILAH Seminar, Transnational Law and Transnational Legal Pluralism: Methodological Observations, presented by Professor Peer Zumbansen (Osgoode Hall Law School, York University)
Convenor: Professor Anne Orford
Today, as governments and civil society actors work through the challenges of a continually unfolding economic crisis, the relative historical and socio-economic embeddedness of various proposed ‘responses’ must be understood as starting points, not as obstacles in the search of remedies. While the global dimension of the crisis suggests the need of global responses, such efforts should not come at the price of disregarding particular local regulatory experiences and normative trajectories.
A comparative perspective on law and political economies allows us to more adequately assess the evolution of embedded regulatory responses and their contestations: seen through a legal pluralist lens, law and regulation appear as part of a continuing transformation of national legal orders and political economies, both as sociological objects and as discursive practices. In order, however, to grasp the increasingly transterritorial nature of public and private spaces in which particular instantiations and developments of ‘law’ and ‘regulation’ are recognized, it is necessary to complement the comparative law and political economy perspective with a distinctly transnational dimension. It is on the transnational level, that the proliferation of public, private and increasingly hybrid, quasi-political transnational actors that seek to regulate and to influence human affairs, is both lauded and criticized with regard to numerous open questions concerning these actors’ legitimacy, authority and accountability. While lawyers tend to address these concerns by attempting to re-embed transnational governance actors into traditional concepts of the state or of civil society, non-lawyers offer intriguing perspectives on the normativity challenges of transnational governance that both build on and reach beyond learned state-society distinctions. Against this background, the concept of ‘transnational legal pluralism’ [TLP] goes beyond Philip Jessup’s 1956 proposal of complementing and challenging Public and Private International Law with the idea of ‘transnational law’: TLP brings together insights from legal sociology, comparative law and legal theory with research on ‘global justice’, ethics and regulatory theory. Such a concept might allow us to illuminate and assess the methodological premises of contemporary investigations into transnational or, global governance.
Professor Zumbansen holds the Canada Research Chair in Transnational and Comparative Law of Corporate Governance at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto and is the Director of the Critical Research Laboratory in Law & Society at Osgoode. He is the Co-Founder and Co-Editor in Chief of the German Law Journal, and the Co-Founder and Co-Editor in Chief of the Comparative Research in Law and Political Economy Research Paper Series.
29 April 2009: IILAH Seminar, Situational Gravity Under the Rome Statute, presented by Kevin Jon Heller (Melbourne Law School)
Convenor: Professor Anne Orford
Professor Gerry Simpson (Melbourne Law School) will chair the event.
The ICC is often derided as the “African Criminal Court.” That criticism cannot easily be dismissed: all of the Office of the Prosecutor’s (OTP) current investigations focus on African states – Uganda, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Sudan – and it is analyzing the situations in three other African states, Cote D’Ivoire, Kenya, and Chad, to determine whether formal investigation is warranted. At the same time, the OTP has declined to investigate the situations in a number of non-African states, such as Venezuela and Iraq – the latter despite its conclusion that there was a “reasonable basis to believe” that UK nationals had willfully killed a number of civilians and subjected a number of others to inhumane treatment.
The OTP has not denied – nor could it – that it has focused exclusively on situations in Africa. Instead, it has argued that its investigative decisions have been driven solely by an objective assessment of the gravity of the various situations, as required by Article 53 of the Rome Statute. In its view, the African situations are simply graver than the non-African situations, because they involve far greater numbers of victims.
This essay critiques the OTP’s quantitative conception of situational gravity. More specifically, it argues that the OTP should de-emphasize the number of victims in a situation in favor of three qualitative factors when it determines the gravity of a situation: (1) whether the situation involves crimes that were committed systematically, as the result of a plan or policy; (2) whether the situation involves crimes that offend the fundamental values of the international community – those that cause “social alarm”; and (3) whether the situation involves crimes that were committed by States, instead of by rebel groups.
Kevin Jon Heller is currently a Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School, where he teaches criminal law and international criminal law. He has a JD from Stanford Law School, MA in literature from Duke University, and MA and BA in social and political theory from the New School for Social Research, all with honors. His work has appeared in the European Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, the Michigan Law Review, the Leiden Journal of International Law, and others. He is currently writing a book entitled “The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law,” (fortcoming 2010, Oxford). Kevin has been involved in the International Criminal Court's negotiations over the crime of aggression, served as Human Rights Watch's external legal advisor on the trial of Saddam Hussein, and consulted with the defense in a number of cases at the ICTY and ICTR. He is currently serving as one of Radovan Karadzic's formally-appointed legal associates.
2 April 2009: IILAH Seminar, Safety standards and indigenous products: what role for traditional knowledge?, presented by Ms Meredith Kolsky Lewis (Victoria University of Wellington Law School)
In this seminar Ms Lewis will examine legal questions relating to the export of indigenous plant-based foods and medicinal products. In particular, it will look at recent bans and other forms of import restrictions on kava from Pacific Island countries and tea tree oil from Australia. Both products have traditional uses which date back hundreds of years. In both cases, the products have been adapted into new uses, and health problems have been linked to these new uses. Yet the trade restrictions have covered the products as a whole, thus burdening the traditional uses as well as the new, adapted uses. The seminar will consider the implications of such bans on indigenous communities/developing countries, and explore whether steps could be taken to minimise the risk of imposing overbroad regulations on products which may have a traditional and safe use as well as new, perhaps not-so-safe uses. In this regard Ms Lewis will suggest that traditional knowledge, which is at present a concept limited to the intellectual property/TRIPS context within the WTO, may also have a role to play in the SPS and TBT contexts.
Meredith Kolsky Lewis (BA Northwestern University, JD and MSFS Georgetown University) is the New Zealand alternate member of the International Trade Law Committee of the International Law Association; a Founding Executive Committee member and currently Secretary of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL), and a member of the Asian WTO Research Network. She has provided trade-related technical assistance in Vietnam (funded by NZAID) and Indonesia (funded by US AID) and has provided training on various WTO issues for the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Meredith is serving as a judge in the preliminary written and final oral rounds (in Taipei) of the 2009 ELSA WTO Moot Court Competition.
Meredith has been awarded a Visiting International Researcher Fellowship by the Melbourne Law School and is spending six weeks at the law school conducting joint research relating to food miles with Associate Professor Andrew Mitchell.
25 March 2009: IILAH Seminar, State Building and International Law: Problems, Paradigms and Prospects, presented by Professor Antony Anghie (University of Utah)
(Convenor: Professor Dianne Otto)
Professor Anne Orford (Melbourne Law School) will chair the event and Professor Gerry Simpson (LSE/Melbourne Law School) will act as a discussant.
In recent years, international organisations have become heavily involved in territorial administration and `state building’. This presentation reviews some of the recent literature which examines and assesses the legal issues that international territorial administration presents to the international system, and the different principles, doctrines and procedures that have been developed as a response. It then considers how this `law of international territorial administration’ relates to broader issues of sovereignty, governance, development and security, and the relationship between current legal models and historical precursors.
Tony Anghie is the Samuel D. Thurman Professor at the S.J.Quinney School of Law, University of Utah. He received his BA (1986) and an LLB (1987) from Monash University in Melbourne. He earned his SJD (1995) at Harvard Law School, where he also served as a senior fellow from 1993 to 1995. in Australia, Tony practiced employment law, administrative law, and international law. He has also completed an internship with the International Monetary Fund in Washington D.C. in 1994. Tony has taught at various universities including: American University of Cairo, the University of Tokyo and the University of Auckland and he also lectures frequently in Sri Lanka. His research interests include public international law, international commercial transactions and human rights. He has served on the Executive Councils of both the American Society of International Law and the Asian Society of International Law. He is the author of Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge UP 2005) and is a member of the Third World Approaches to International Law network of scholars.
17 March 2009: IILAH Seminar, WTO Dispute Settlement: Recent Australian Experience, presented by Ms Amanda Gorley (DFAT)
(Convenors: Associate Professor Andrew Mitchell and Associate Professor Tania Voon)
Amanda Gorely is the head of the WTO Trade Law Branch in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and has had first hand involvement in Australia’s dispute settlement activity since commencing in this role in 2005. She will outline Australia’s approach to WTO dispute settlement and reflect on some of the pros and cons of the system.
Amanda is a graduate of Melbourne Law School (1990) and joined DFAT as a legal specialist in 1993 after completing articles at a Melbourne law firm. In the course of her career at DFAT, Amanda has worked on a range of international law issues in addition to trade, including human rights, counter-terrorism and environment. She has been posted to Stockholm and Geneva and will take up the position of Deputy High Commissioner to New Zealand in April.
24 February 2009: PhD Completion Seminar, Hosted by IILAH, Recognition, Redistribution and Resistance: Assessing the Usefulness of the Right to Health in Sub-Saharan Africa, presented by Mr Daniel Muriu
This thesis examines the use of social and economic rights, and in particular the right to health, as a means of ensuring and securing better health in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is argued that, in light of the challenges posed to health by international economic actors, it is critical that such assessment goes beyond the normative value, justiciability and enforceability of the right to health and engages more with such issues as power, resistance, international and local economic constraints and the nature of the state in the Third World. It is argued that such an engagement may help to bring out more clearly the possibilities and limits of the right to health.
21 January 2009: IILAH Seminar, The Regulation of Female Nudity in Public Spaces: Why are Breasts Such a Threat?, presented by Ms Chantal Morton (Osgoode Hall Law School)
(Convenors: Associate Professor Andrew Mitchell and Associate Professor Tania Voon)
This paper combines the approaches of Judith Butler and Henrie Lefebvre in order to examine the jurisprudence respecting female public nudity in Canada, and to develop a theoretical framework that might simultaneously acknowledge the importance of bodies, spaces and legal discourses in the regulation/production of gendered identities.
Ms Chantal Morton currently teaches "Law, Gender and Equality" at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. She previously taught a course on "Law and Poverty" and for two years was the Academic Director of Parkdale Community Legal Services, a legal aid clinic run with a full-time class of 20 law students. Ms Morton is a doctoral candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School, completing a dissertation on The relevance of critical geography to the theories and practices of law, while fulfilling responsibilities, for the past 8 years, as Director of the Career Services Office also at Osgoode Hall Law School.
Contact details:
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
The Institute for International Law and the Humanities will host a Doctoral Roundtable with Professor Martti Koskenniemi (Helsinki) and Professor Robert Wai (Osgoode) from 12:30 to 5pm on Wednesday 11 November 2009 at the Melbourne Law School.
Professor Martti Koskenniemi is a leading critical theorist and historian of international law and a former Finnish diplomat. He is currently Academy Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. In 2008 - 2009 he held the seat of distinguished visiting Goodhart Professor at the Faculty of Law, Cambridge University. He is one of the leaders of a major new research project at the University of Helsinki on ‘Between Restoration and Revolution, National Constitutions and Global Law: An Alternative View on the European Century 1815-1914’.
Professor Robert Wai has been a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School since 1998 and served as Associate Dean of the Law School from January 2006 through June 2008. He is a leading scholar in the fields of transnational law and legal theory. His current work-in-progress includes papers on security and the limits to international economic law, cosmopolitanism and transnational economic law and the shift in trade law argumentation from formalism to pragmatism.
The roundtable will provide the opportunity for doctoral students in the fields of international law, transnational law, jurisprudence, history, international relations and politics to present brief work-in-progress papers (of around 15 minutes) and then receive feedback from Martti, Robert and audience members. Students interested in taking part in the roundtable are invited to send a brief abstract of the paper they would like to present to Sarah Thyssen, sthyssen@unimelb.edu.au by Friday 16 October. While the number of presenters will be limited in order to allow time for conversation about each paper, attendance at the roundtable will be open to all interested faculty and students.
Event details:
Date: 11 November 2009, 12.30-5.00pm
Venue: Room 920, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne
Contact details:
IILAH Administrator
law-iilah@unimelb.edu.au
(03) 8344 6589