Come Work for Opinio Juris (for Free)

Alas, we are losing our wonderful Editorial Assistant, Parisa Zangeneh, who needs to focus on her PhD at NUI-Galway. Parisa has been an incredible asset to Opinio Juris as an editor and in terms of her own blogging. (See here for an example of the latter.) She will be much missed, though she will maintain her blogging rights and we hope she will continue to write for us as much as her schedule allows.

Because Parisa is leaving, we are on the lookout for a new Editorial Assistant (EA). The position requires approximately 8 hours per week — sometimes a bit more when we have a major symposium, sometimes a bit less when posting is light and we don’t receive many submissions. The EA has two basic responsibilities. The first is to run the Opinio Juris inbox. The EA is our initial line of defense, sorting through submissions and deciding which ones are strong enough to pass along to the other members of the blog. So we have to trust their judgment. The second is helping our Managing Editor, Jessica Dorsey, with proofreading, formatting, and posting submissions; organizing symposia; corresponding with authors; making edits to posts months after they’ve been published in response to annoying author requests. (Just kidding about that last bit — kinda.)

The ideal candidate is a PhD student or postdoc who focuses on international law, though we would consider an LLM or JD student. The EA has to have excellent mastery of written English, though being a native speaker is not necessarily required. We particularly encourage applications from individuals who come from underrepresented backgrounds, whether in terms of gender or race or geography. Regardless of background, though, we need the chosen candidate to commit to working with us for at least a year — the learning curve is a bit steep and we don’t want to have to constantly train new EAs. We modestly believe the position is a great way for a young scholar or practitioner to advance their career in international law, especially as we encourage our EAs to write for the blog. (See, e.g., Parisa, supra at para. 1.)

Sounds great, right? Here’s the downside: we can’t pay our EA. We wish that were not the case and it may change in the future, but Opinio Juris currently operates with a very limited budget. We don’t have an institutional sponsor with deep pockets, and we are not Just Security or Lawfare. In fact, although we have a “Donate” button on our main page that no one uses, we have never — not once in 16 years — asked readers for money. None of our members has ever been paid a cent for their blogging. We are proud of that, but it means we simply don’t have the funds for an EA.

We fully realise the unfairness of asking for unpaid help. Our penury obviously means that we will lose some brilliant candidates. There is just no alternative. We hope that the flexibility of the position — our EA can work from anywhere and there are obviously no set hours, given that the rest of us are scattered around the globe — will at least partially compensate for the financial limitations.

If you are interested in applying for the position, please send a CV and short letter of motivation (explaining why you want the position and where it fits into your professional trajectory) to opiniojurisblog@gmail.com no later than June 7.

We look forward to hearing from you!