LL280      Half Unit
Advanced Issues in Public International Law

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

In this advanced-level course, we build on Public International Law by considering how the concepts and structuring ideas explored in that course give rise to and organise work in a number of specialised fields of international law. We are interested in understanding how those fields and their associated institutions function, with a keen focus on the particular legal ordering – categories, inclusions and exclusions – they create. We will begin with an introduction to the course, by the teaching team, exploring how international law works in the world, and, in making explicit the terms of legal ordering across the fields, expose what kinds of politics, protections and wrongs they make possible. Our first case study will then follow: feminist approaches to international law will allow us to interrogate the boundaries, assumptions, and beneficiaries set by the international legal system and we’ll do so by considering a range of fields including peace and security, international humanitarian law and international human rights law. From there, the course will dedicate two weeks to the study of a chosen field of international law, starting with a detailed lecture on the law and architecture of that field followed by a cutting-edge case study that engages explicitly with its complexities of legal ordering. 
 
We begin our coverage of specific areas of international law with a focus on International Environmental Law, followed by an indepth case study, such as on the Rights of Nature and the turn to centring ecosystems as bearers of legal rights. We will then study the field of International Investment Law before delving into a case study on a topic such as seabed mining, with its impacts on the marine environment and local communities, and the plurality of interests and norms that are engaged by investment treaty disputes. From there, we might take a deep dive into the field of International Trade Law to understand theories of free trade and the core World Trade Organization principles and rules before unpacking, through the case study, a highly topical issue such as the first ever use of security exceptions to justify WTO-inconsistent trade measures in a case brought by Ukraine against Russia. The next field we’ll want to understand is International Human Rights Law, internationally and regionally. Our case study here explores how law conditions our political and economic order and how the recent UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants to seeds, food sovereignty, decommodification, and economic democracy attempts to reorder international law.

2 hours of lectures and 1 hours of classes in the Spring Term.
20 hours of lectures and 9 hours of classes in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

Essay

Reading assignments are provided for each seminar on Moodle and draw from various primary and secondary source materials. Some other works to which you may wish to refer include: H. Charlesworth and C. Chinkin, The Boundaries of International Law; J. Klabbers, International Law ; J.T. Gathii and N. Tzouvala, ‘Racial Capitalism and International Economic Law: Introduction’ 25 Journal of International Economic Law 2 (2022).

Exam (100%), duration: 150 Minutes in the Spring exam period