Lecture Next Week at UCL

Opinio Juris readers who are based in London may be interested in coming to a lecture I’ll be giving for the ILA at University College London next week. Here is the relevant information:

International Law Association (British Branch) Lecture
What is an international crime?

Wednesday 5 March 2014, 6-7pm

• Speaker: Professor Kevin Jon Heller (Prof. of Criminal Law, SOAS)
• Chair: Dr Kimberley Trapp (UCL)
• Venue: UCL Faculty of Laws
• Admission: Free of charge
• Accreditation: 1 CPD hour SRA (BSB pending)

Nearly all ICL scholars accept the idea that an international crime is an act that is directly criminalized by international law. Professor Heller will challenge that definition, what he calls the “direct-criminalization thesis,” in this lecture. More specifically, he argue that the thesis can only be defended on the basis of an unconvincing and illegitimate naturalist understanding of the creation of international law — and that any attempt to defend the direct-criminalization thesis on positivist grounds collapses it into what he calls the “national-criminalization thesis,” the idea that an international crime is an act that all states are obligated to domestically criminalize.

This is essentially the same presentation I gave at Oxford a few weeks ago, so if you were there or listened to the podcast, there is no reason to come to this event. But if you do go, please come up afterward and say hello!