International law activities

Visit of Secretary-General of the Curatorium of the Xiamen Academy of International Law

• Date: 3 February 2016
• Speaker: Chia-Jui CHENG (Professor of International Law, Soochow University; Visiting Professor of International Law, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China) met with the directors and members of MILC and gave a lecture to the LLM students.

Launch of the Digitised Melland Schill Lectures

• Date: 1 February 2016
• Speaker: Sir Michael Wood, member of the UN International Law Commission, barrister at 20 Essex Street Chambers
• More about the digitisation of the Melland Schill lectures

Workshop on Cyber Espionage and International Law

• Date: 21 January 2016
• Speakers: Dr Russel Buchan, Senior Lecturer University of Sheffield, Thibault Moulin, PhD Candidate University of Manchester/ Université Grenoble-Alpes, Marusa Veber, PhD Candidate University of Ljubljana

The Sources of International Law workshops

• Date: 5 - 6 September 2015
• Location: University of Fribourg, Switzerland

This workshop will allow the authors of the chapters of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on the Sources of International Law to present their drafts and discuss the fundamental questions on the contemporary doctrine of international law which are at the heart of this volume. This workshop is organised in collaboration with the University of Fribourg and is made possible thanks to a grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

• Date: 5 - 6 December 2014
• Location: University of Fribourg, Switzerland

This event was organised by the University of Fribourg and MILC. It was a closed meeting for the authors of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on the Sources of International Law. Drafts chapters of the Handbook were presented and discussed. 

Panel on International Law as an Argumentative Practice

• Date: 26 June 2015
• Location: Erasmus School of Law, Rotterdam

In collaboration with the Amsterdam Centre for International Law (ACIL), MILC will hold a panel on International Law as an Argumentative Practice in the framework of the International Conference on Legal Argumentation and the Rule of Law that will take place at the Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam on 25 and 26 June 2015.

The panel is convened by Dr Ingo Venzke and is premised on the idea that different strands of scholarship converge on thinking of international law as an argumentative practice. At the same time, their superficial agreement unravels upon a closer look at competing underlying conceptions of what it means to argue. Such a closer look continues to be largely missing from the debates. While remnants of arguing as right inferences from first principles continues to fade from view, thinking of arguing as aimed at winning acceptance is increasingly en vogue. That fashion can be gleaned from the increasingly prominent place that the notion of interpretative communities plays in international legal scholarship in the way it has been coined by Fish in 1980. But that notion is not without problems either. It threatens to degenerate into a public relations view of argumentative practice where audience rating is the only remaining standard for assessment. The emphasis on acceptance alone seems to present but a flat view of international law as an argumentative practice as it can hardly account for the quality of arguments and the mindsets of participants in that practice. If international law is to be taken seriously as a normative practice, something else needs to replace the emphasis on acceptance so as to account for the quality of reasons. The variety of pedestrian reasons which may lead actors to accept certain legal arguments rather than another may not do the job.

• What are the competing conceptions of argument in the bourgeoning international legal literature that implicitly or explicitly subscribes to thinking of international law as an argumentative practice?
• Which ones fare better than others?
• Which conceptions square best with recent developments in argumentation theory?

Those are the underlying questions that the proposed panel intends to tackle.

Justice in non-international armed conflicts

• Date: 6 - 7 March 2015
• Location: The University of Manchester, UK

This closed expert workshop organised and hosted by Manchester International Law Centre (MILC), in collaboration of the Syrian Legal Development Programme and Lawyers for Justice in Libya, will seek to grapple with challenges of the judicial process in non-international armed conflicts. The particular aim of the workshop is to reflect on the standards which are applicable (or should apply) to such situations and to formulate guidelines for the future. Participants will include legal professionals, aid workers, representatives of inter-governmental and supranational bodies, academics and representatives of governments.