This is the final part in my series on PG studies. I haven’t covered everything but, hopefully, enough to help lift some of the angst PG students feel. I admit this series is more formulaic than I envisaged. PG studies are a wonderful experience and academic research is an artistic and creative endeavour, despite my overly mechanical representation. While I...
The eminent jurist Harry Arthurs opens a provocative article — Law and Learning in an Era of Globalisation — with a binary. He splits legal scholars into pools of optimists and pessimists, classifying them according to their perception of the trajectory of legal education. “The optimists amongst us assume that human hands — our hands — shape legal education, that legal...
Mohsen al Attar and Rafael Quintero Godinez Investment is a heavy word. It stumbles rather than rolls off the tongue, perhaps because the speaker is aware of its convoluted character. It invokes images of factories, infrastructure, workers, money, and men (in suits or in hard hats, usually both). Most of all, investment conveys an evolutionary trajectory; one that is ideological and...
As a teenager, I read Angela Davis, CLR James, Edward Said, Kwame Nkrumah, and Malcolm X. From a young age, I was perplexed by the contingency of global living standards, failing to comprehend why much of my national community (in Egypt) was mired in squalor while my adopted ones were swaddled in comfort. Each thinker linked contemporary privilege to historic...
Before tackling the topic of today's essay - the don'ts of the PG degree - I return to my opening metaphor: the rollercoaster. A postgraduate degree can help you touch the skies just as it can send you plummeting to the seabed. There is however one inaccuracy in the metaphor: postgraduate students don't realise they are boarding a rollercoaster. Instead of...
In Part 1 of this series, I likened postgraduate studies to rollercoasters for provoking peaks and troughs alike. Students begin their degrees with curiosity and glee. For an academic, there is probably nothing more satisfying than an inaugural LLM or PhD lecture: students smile at each other, laugh at our jokes, and sometimes even applaud our performances. To the delight...
Rollercoasters are not for everyone. Some celebrate the speed, courage, and maybe even fright that accompanies the ride; the thrill is exhilarating. Others, like my cousin Ahmed, sneer at the foolishness of their counterparts (me). He does not hide his glee when I stumble out of the car, confident he made the right decision when I turn varying shades of...
One year ago, I accepted the role of Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of the West Indies. I did not act on a whim. Throughout my academic career, I’ve held many management roles from Director of Postgraduate Studies to Director of Internationalisation and plenty of others in between. A deanship was the natural—and, frankly, desirable—next step. Over...
Few international economic lawyers doubt the value of foreign direct investment (FDI). There is even some consensus that FDI plays a vital role in fostering development in host states. It triggers technology expansion, assists human capital formation, and nurtures a dynamic business environment. States—especially across the Third World—appeal to investors in the hopes of attracting a share of the green gold. Although there is truth to...
International legal scholarship is undergoing a metamorphosis. Scholars may quibble over the catalyst and trajectory, but they concur that a shift is underway. At least this was the premise of a symposium organised by the Chicago Journal of International Law this past week, entitled The Transformation of International Law Scholarship. The event showcased three American legal academics: Daniel Adebe, Adam Chilton, and Tom Ginsburg....
I draw your attention to the title. It is an amalgamation of two phrases. Follow the money is pithy, even a little crass. It is often uttered in television crime dramas, usually to aid the protagonist identify the culprit. The Misery of International Law is the title of a book by Linarelli, Salomon, and Sornorajah. So provocative is this text on International Economic Law (IEL) that it...
What is power? Which states have it, and which don’t? Are there some processes that accelerate its ascendancy and others that quicken its decay? Most of all, how does public international law (PIL) correspond to this concept and to these processes? In Emerging Powers and the International Order, Andreas Buser touches upon all of these questions. In the following post,...