In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Legal education

07 Oct

[Mohsen al Attar is Associate Dean of Learning & Teaching at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University as well as a Contributing Editor to Opinio Juris] Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza—a fifth since its false disengagement in 2006—has once again exposed the catastrophic failures of international law in protecting the world’s most vulnerable from militarism and settler-colonialism. While purportedly targeting resistance, a dubious goal...

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03 Oct

In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said paints a portrait of the public intellectual. Part description and part aspiration (and maybe a little autobiography as well), he represents the intellectual as an outsider, a subversive whose role is to challenge the status quo by “speaking truth to power.” While this statement was probably never intended as more than a catchy...

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25 Jul

Twitch is a live-streaming platform launched in 2011 to cater to the growing supply of amateur and professional gamers playing videogames for an audience. Twitch allows the user to stream, simultaneously, footage of themselves and of their videogame at the same time, which meant that gamers could build entire communities around a shared activity. This rapidly grew into much more than just gaming, though. Twitch...

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19 Jan

Universities are in a topsy-turvy state. They face enormous and often contradictory pressures from a mix of protagonists including governments and parents, corporations and alumni. These pressures are dwarfed only by the worries of our students, anxious about the direction of the global political economy and the implications for their futures. Each group looks to the tertiary sector for...

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08 Dec

As a result of the recent decision by the Harvard Law Review to not publish a commissioned article by Palestinian scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, I have signed the following Open Letter, along with 100 more of my fellow international law scholars. I hope others will sign as well (here). I am attaching the full text below. Academic FreedomOpen...

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10 Oct

If you're not careful, [international lawyers] will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.Malcolm X The Power of Mythmaking  Origin stories are always more fiction than fact, more myth than reality. At times, origin stories serve to redeem a dubious past, while at others they enable us to justify an unwelcoming...

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18 Sep

Travelling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. Ibn Battuta From its vantage point atop the Kasbah in Tangier, Morocco, the Ibn Battuta museum overlooks the meeting point of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea—a vista coloured by myriad beginnings and a few endings as well. More of a memorial than a museum, the site...

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05 Apr

Dr Mohsen al Attar and (Dr) Omar Kamel Academics are professional thinkers. We might be charitable and describe ourselves as specialised communicators as well. We engage in a variety of roles, ranging from the advancement of knowledge to the teaching and mentoring of students, from guiding policymakers to supporting social movements. Some of these tasks are mundane—setting assessment questions—just as others...

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23 Mar

Dr Mohsen al Attar and Dr Rafael Quintero Godínez** Modern legal education has been criticised for trying to make itself harmless. Law professors provide students with a sanitised view of the field that camouflages the cracks and contradictions on offer. This approach leads to the circulation of parochial knowledge that overlooks the nuances of the societies we inhabit and the struggles...

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24 Feb

[Tania Ixchel Atilano, born in Mexico City, has a Juris Doctor from the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research interests lie in the fields of history of international humanitarian law, international criminal law and criminal law. The author kindly thanks Professor Vivianne Weng for her invaluable feedback and comments.] Due to copyright issues, the images discussed have not been reproduced here. A link...

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22 Feb

1 Experimentation is the lifeblood of a pedagogue. Without this, our craft is at risk of going stale: the materials will become anachronistic, just as the methods will falter. Law schools, however, are not ideal sites for experimentation. Staunchly grounded in professional practice—we might say jealously guarded by the guild—the curriculum constricts space for pedagogical adventure, bounded by the demands of an absentee landowner. Law students are not...

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