Mohsen al Attar Joining Opinio Juris!

Thirteen years ago, when I was teaching at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, I helped recruit a brilliant young Osgoode Hall PhD student to the law school for a lectureship. He moved halfway around the world, as I had the year before, and we quickly became fast friends based on our similar intellectual interests, mutual enjoyment of running, and shared love of Arsenal. And then… I left Auckland for the University of Melbourne. He never forgave me, and he still teases me after more than a decade of friendship about abandoning him.

As you have probably guessed, I’m referring to Mohsen al Attar, who I am delighted to announce is the newest permanent member of Opinio Juris.

We are truly delighted that Mohsen is joining us. He is Egyptian, Canadian, and apparently British; fluent in Arabic and French; and grew up in several cities, including Cairo, Montreal, and Stockholm. After his stint in Auckland, he spent most of the next decade teaching at McGill, Queens University Belfast, and the University of Warwick. And he is now, at an absurdly young age, the new Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill.

I think it is fair to say that Mohsen is one of the brightest young stars in the world of critical international law. You will have read his superb introduction to our just-ended symposium on teaching international law critically in the coronavirus age, and I encourage you to browse more of his oeuvre on SSRN. I particularly recommend Mohsen’s chapter “Subverting Eurocentric Epistemology: The Value of Nonsense When Designing Counterfactuals,” which is part of the book that Ingo Venzke and I have just finished editing for OUP. (We submitted the complete manuscript yesterday!) Mohsen is also currently writing a book for OUP entitled A Guerrilla at The Hague: TWAIL and the Future of International Law. I’ve read the proposal and it’s going to be great.

In addition to being an excellent scholar, Mohsen is easily one of the best lecturers I’ve ever seen. If you are visually and aurally inclined, you should definitely check out his successful YouTube Channel, which contains numerous videos of lectures, presentations, webinars, etc. Mohsen is very keen to help Opinio Juris expand its multimedia offerings, which is something we have long wanted to do. That is one of the many reasons we are excited he is joining us. So stay tuned for more on that front.

Welcome to Opinio Juris, Mohsen al Attar — valued colleague and dear friend! We’re now even for Auckland…