ESIL Interest Group History of International Law

ESIL Interest Group History of International Law

Wednesday 13 November 2019

LECTURE: The Fifth Annual Asser Lecture 2019 with Prof. Anne ORFORD: the social question in international law (The Hague: 28 NOV 2019)

(image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Event abstract:
While international law has played a central role in creating the conditions for market liberalisation on a global scale, many international lawyers have paid less attention to the social question, leaving human welfare, social unrest, labour relations, or migration to be addressed by economists, criminologists, sociologists, or demographers. According to Prof. Orford, the current situation of people who are dispossessed or impoverished by economic liberalisation, and the exhaustion of the world’s resources have become inescapable barriers to the continuation of ‘global business as usual’. In our Fifth Asser Annual Lecture, Prof. Orford puts the social question back on the international law table. How might international economic law-making and adjudication be re-embedded within political processes? And how can foundational political questions about property, security, survival, and freedom be returned to democratic control? We are very honoured that Sigrid Kaag, Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation in The Netherlands will join us to celebrate the fifth year anniversary of the Annual T.M.C. Asser Lecture (to be confirmed).
On the speaker:
Anne Orford is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law, and an Australian Laureate Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where she directs the Laureate Program in International Law. Anne Orford is also an elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She has held visiting positions at Lund University, University Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), the University of Gothenburg, NYU School of Law and Harvard Law School. Her work combines the study of history and theory of international law with an engagement with central debates in social theory, history, economics and philosophy. Orford aims to grasp the changing nature and function of international law and its relation to social, political, and economic transformation. Her major publications include International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press 2011), Reading Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge University Press 2003), the edited collection International Law and its Others (Cambridge University Press 2006), and, as co-editor, The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford University Press 2016). A collection of her essays in French, entitled Pensée Critique et Droit International, is forthcoming with Pedone. Her latest monograph International Law and the Politics of History, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. Her work has been recognised by numerous honorary doctorates of laws. 
(source: Asser Institute$)