Legal education

[Radhika Kapoor (Twitter: @Radhikaaah) is a Fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict.] This piece has been written in the author's personal capacity and does not reflect the views of the author's institution. The author thanks Professor Naz Modirzadeh, Sapan Parekh, and Ashrutha Rai for helpful comments, and Shashankaa Tewari for research assistance. The terrain of...

[David Matyas is a PhD Candidate and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law whose research focuses on the laws of humanitarian assistance. Before turning to law, he worked as an aid worker focusing on disaster risk, with placements in Niger and Senegal.] Each year, as the holidays roll around in winter and summer, I’m...

1- White Supremacy and the International Legal Order Writing in 1997, Charles Mills threw a grenade into political theory. With a touch of hyperbole, we might even say he collapsed the contours of the social sciences. Standard undergraduate philosophy courses, he tells us, cover two thousand years of political thought. Mainstream philosophers introduce students to liberalism and libertarianism, capitalism and communitarianism, socialism...

Call for Papers Robert Cryer - A Life in Law and a Law unto Himself: We greatly miss Professor Rob Cryer, who passed away in 2021 at the age of forty-six. We aim to channel this loss, those missings, into an event, and a book, that celebrates his oeuvre, research, mentorship, teaching, insights, idiosyncrasy, laughter, vim, and wit. We plan an eclectic...

[Roy is a faculty member at Jindal Global Law School in India. Roy has published under a pseudonym so that they may remain anonymous.] International law school rankings are dominated by institutions in Europe, North America and Australia. As an indication, the previous editions of the Times Higher Education and QS rankings included just one and two law schools from outside...

[Chris Carpenter is a lawyer and researcher in international law. She holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a master’s from the University of Cambridge.] This piece is about imposter syndrome, which I encountered in beginning my master’s at the University of Cambridge. When I submitted an abstract for this symposium, countless memories spanning almost a decade...

[Dr Talita de Souza Dias is the Shaw Foundation Junior Research Fellow in Law at Jesus College, University of Oxford.] 1. Introduction In this post, I discuss the findings of a short statistical survey into the gender and nationality/regional representation of authors published by two mainstream academic publishers in their main international law monograph series: Oxford University Press (OUP) and Cambridge University...

Legal academia is a contact sport. Students, faculty, and managers brutalise one another with gusto. Personifying the adversarial character of the dominant legal systems, they wrestle over course design and assessment, procedures and promotions, not to mention teaching allocation and the inevitable inequities that ensue. And I’ve only scratched the surface. To improve win rates (or survival chances), participants in...

[Ralph Wilde is a member of the Faculty of Law at University College London, University of London.] Photo: James Crawford and four of his former doctoral students, from left to right: the author, Karen Knop, Christine Chinkin, and Susan Marks (photo reproduced with permission). This is the text of a presentation given at the American Society of International Law event, March 2022,...

[Lucas Lixinski (@IntHeritageLaw) is Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney.] One of the key reasons people in law do PhDs is because we are at least contemplating a life in academia. Otherwise, we would just go into legal practice, where a PhD gives no discernible advantage. While research is what we are taught to do during a PhD, there is...

[Barrie Sander (@Barrie_Sander) is Assistant Professor of International Justice at Leiden University – Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs. Rebecca Sutton (@RebeccaAnneLaw) is Senior Lecturer in International Law at the University of Glasgow School of Law. She is the author of The Humanitarian Civilian (OUP, 2021).] In international law academia, there are many processes that remain somewhat shrouded in secrecy. Writing a book...

[Fleur Johns (@FleurEJ) is Professor in the Faculty of Law & Justice and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at UNSW Sydney.] Abstracts are often afterthought texts: frequently dashed off while one is pressed against the railing of a deadline. Yet they are gateway texts on which much can hinge. Conference doors can swing open or close on the strength of an abstract. A successful response...