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Past Seminars (click here to view details of Past Seminars).

Seminars for 2007

Forthcoming Seminars

Refugee Solutions or Solutions to Refugeehood

You are invited to attend the free Public Lecture on "Refugee Solutions or Solutions to Refugeehood" to be presented by Professor James Hathaway.

About the Speaker

Professor James Hathaway is the James E. and Sarah A. Degan Professor of Law at The University of Michigan Law School. He is one of the world's pre-eminent experts on international refugee law. He is the founding director of the University of Michigan's Program in Refugee and Asylum Law, Senior Visiting Research Associate at Oxford University's Refugee Studies Programme, and President of the Cuenca Colloquium on International Refugee Law. Professor Hathaway's publications include more than sixty journal articles, a leading treatise on the refugee definition (The Law of Refugee Status, 1991 ), an interdisciplinary study of models for refugee law reform (Reconcieving International Refugee Law, 1997) and, most recently, The Rights of Refugees under International Law (2005) - an analysis of the human rights of refugees set by the UN Refugee Convention.

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Please RSVP to law.scigl@usyd.edu.au to ensure that your contact details are recorded on our mailing list for future events.

You are also invited to join Professor James Hathaway, Associate Professor Mary Crock and Ms Jennifer Burns in the "Refugee Workshop: Children and Refugee Protection and the Challenges of Trafficking in Persons" to be held in Lecture Theatre 5, Level 1, Sydney Law School. To register for the workshop, please contact Ms Val Carey on 02 9351 0238 or visit the Continuing Legal Education website for more details.

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Teeming Voids: The International Law of Lawlessness

About the Topic

Places of “extraordinary rendition”, secret prisons, holding rooms for “ghost detainees”, unlisted flights: in recent international legal literature, these are configured as antithetical to public international law. Yet shadowy domains such as these remain crucial to international law’s continued insistence upon the disciplinary and revelatory effects of legal conscience (whether individualized or vested in an “international community”). Accordingly, the publication of the infamous torture memos, prepared by legal advisors to the Bush administration, was greeted among international legal scholars with a mixture of disgust, titillation, and triumph. It is that ambivalent response, among international legal scholars, to the “revelation” that the memos’ publication enacted that this paper will probe. In so doing, this paper is concerned with the following questions: How is the authority of international law constituted today, and what part do domains seen as lacking or preceding law play in that constitution?

About the Speaker

Dr Fleur Johns is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of Sydney, teaching and conducting research mainly in public international law and legal theory. Fleur is a graduate of the University of Melbourne (BA, LLB (Hons)) and Harvard Law School (LLM, SJD). She is a member of the Editorial Boards of the Leiden Journal of International Law (co-editor, Articles), the Australian Journal of Human Rights, and the Sydney Law Review and a former Primary Editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. Fleur practised at the New York Bar for six years and has worked with a number of non-governmental and international organizations in Australia and elsewhere. Awards of which Fleur has been recipient include the Menzies Scholarship (Harvard University), a Leverhulme Visiting Fellowship to the U.K. (Birkbeck College), and the Laylin Prize (Harvard Law School). Additional information, including a publication list, is available at http://www.law.usyd.edu.au/about/staff/FleurJohns/index.shtml. Prior publications related to this seminar paper include the following: Fleur Johns, ‘Performing Power: The Deal, Corporate Rule, and the Constitution of Global Legal Order’ (2007) 34 Journal of Law and Society 116-138 and Fleur Johns, 'Guantanamo Bay and the Annihilation of the Exception' (2005) 16(4) European Journal of International Law 613-635.

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The Law's Response to Terrorism - What mechanisms can best balance the interests of society and the rights of individuals?

You are invited to attend the free Public Lecture on "The Law's Response to Terrorism - What mechanisms can best balance the interests of society and the rights of individuals?" to be presented by Professor Brice Dickson.

About the Speaker

Professor Brice Dickson is Professor of International and Comparative Law at Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. From 1999 to 2005 he was the Chief Commissioner of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and before that a member of the Equal Opportunities Commission for Northern Ireland (1990-96) and of the Law Reform Advisory Committee of Northern Ireland (1997-2002). He currently serves on the British Council’s Governance and Northern Ireland Advisory Committees. His publications include books on the Northern Ireland legal system, civil liberties in Northern Ireland, the European Convention on Human Rights, French law and the House of Lords. He is currently editing a volume for Oxford University Press on judicial activism in supreme courts in the common law world.

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A copy of the evening's transcript is now available. Please click here.

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Recent Investment Arbitration Decisions on the Standard of Fair and Equitable Treatment

You are invited to attend the free public seminar on "Recent Investment Arbitration Decisions on the Standard of Fair and Equitable Treatment" to be presented by Professor August Reinisch of the University of Vienna, Faculty of Law.

About the Topic

Most BITs and many multilateral investment agreements contain clauses requiring the contracting States to provide “fair and equitable treatment” to investors and or investments from the other contracting State. Today, fair and equitable treatment is one of the most frequently invoked provisions in treaty arbitrations and a considerable case-law has developed which helps to identify the precise meaning of the rather vague and general standard. The presentation will focus on the legal bases of the “fair and equitable treatment” standard as identified by investment tribunals. It will address such recent decisions as LG&E v. Argentina, Saluka v. Czech Republic (both 2006) and PSEG v. Turkey (2007).

About the Speaker

Professor August Reinisch is a Professor of European and International Law and Director of the LLM Program at the University of Vienna/Faculty of Law. He holds degrees in law and philosophy and a doctorate from the University of Vienna and an LLM from New York University. His considerable consulting and research experience in the field of international investment disputes includes serving as an arbitrator in the Austrian General Settlement Fund and as President in an UNCITRAL investment arbitration and serving as a member of the ILA Committee on the Law of Foreign Investment.

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Professor Reinisch's presentation may be viewed here.

Please RSVP to law.scigl@usyd.edu.au as spaces are limited!

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Climate Change Law: National and International Developments

About the Topic

Climate change law is emerging as the most fascinating arena for observing processes of national and international normative feedback, for three main reasons. First, because climate change is a truly globalised phenomenon that demands co-ordinated regulation of social, economic and environmental systems at micro, meso and macro scales. Second, because at each of these levels a range of legal responses are being developed (without a high degree of coordination) partly in order to influence the shape of an emergent international climate compact. Third, such an agreement is some distance from being agreed upon, notwithstanding some important steps to date under the rubric of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

In this paper I focus specifically on the actual and potential up-stream influence of Australian climate change law and policy on the development of an international climate change regime. I also consider cross-stream and down-stream normative flows as Australian climate change law at Federal and State levels takes inspiration from (and also inspires) climate change laws developed internationally and in other domestic jurisdictions. My overarching objective is to come to some conclusions as to whether and how Australian climate change law may enable or obstruct the development of an effective successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

About the Speaker

Dr Tim Stephens is a lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of Sydney. He is an expert in international dispute resolution, international courts and tribunals, international environmental law and the law of the sea. To view Dr Stephen's profile, click here.

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Language Rights and International Law: Concepts, Perspectives and Pierre Bourdieu

About the Topic

Language rights are protected in international law in different ways: minority rights, non-discrimination, freedom of expression and cultural rights all have implications for language use. In this paper, I identify common concepts and principles which these different areas of law apply to resolve conflicts regarding rights to use language. I then consider how these concepts and principles both enrich, and yet also limit, our understanding of language claims and the possibilities for resolving them. By orienting the relationship between international law and language policy in particular ways, these conceptual tools may, in some sense, constrain rather than enlarge the possibilities for 'linguistic justice'. I suggest that an alternative conceptual approach, namely that developed in the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, may represent a more productive framework within which to evaluate questions of language use. In considering the usefulness of Bourdieu's work in this context, I also hope to draw some broader conclusions regarding the potential of Bourdieu's conceptual framework as an analytical tool for international law more generally.

About the Speaker

Dr Jacqueline Mowbray comes to us from Cambridge where she is a PhD candidate, about to complete her doctorate in the Faculty of Law. Her research considers the role of international law in relation to language policy, drawing on the methodology of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Jacqui is a graduate of the University of QLD (B.A./LL.B., Hons - first class), the University of Melbourne (LL.M.) and the University of Cambridge (LL.M., Hons - first class). She has practised law with Freehills in Melbourne and Barlow Lyde & Gilbert in London and taught at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina. Her peer-reviewed publications include writings on ethnic minorities’ language rights, property laws in China and Indonesia, international tax treaties, and laws applicable to e-commerce. At Cambridge, she was awarded the 2004 General Sir John Monash Award and the 2002-2003 Britain-Australia Bicentennial Scholarship.

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Chapter VII Powers and the Rule of Law

About the Topic

The expansion of the UN Security Council’s activities since 1990s has posed a fundamental challenge to the supremacy of the rule of law over the influence of discretionary power. While the purposes and principles of the UN Charter as well as human rights norms set an ‘outer limit’ upon the exercise of Chapter VII powers, attention should also be drawn to an ‘inner limit’ specific to the valid exercise of the powers in conformity with the logical reading of the UN Charter. This paper explores possible grounds for ascertaining jurisdictional errors that the Security Council may commit in exercising Chapter VII powers. To that end, this paper draws on the jurisprudence developed in the Australian migration law where the notion of jurisdictional error has recently been given a greater role against the backdrop of significant obstacles posed to judicial review of privative clause decisions.

About the Speaker

Dr Hitoshi Nasu is a lecturer at the ANU College of Law. Prior to his appointment to the ANU, he was a part-time lecturer teaching international law in the Faculty of Law, The University of Sydney, where he also completed a PhD in 2006 by submitting a doctoral thesis on Precautionary Approach to International Security Law: A Study of Article 40 of the UN Charter. His recent publications related to this seminar paper include: Hitoshi Nasu, ‘Responsibility to React? Lessons from the Security Council’s Response to the Southern Lebanon Crisis of 2006’ (2007) International Peacekeeping forthcoming; Kristen Daglish and Hitoshi Nasu, ‘Towards a True Incarnation of the Rule of Law in War-Torn Territories: Centring Peacebuilding in the Will of the People’ (2007) 54 Netherlands International Law Review 81-114.

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If you would like to attend this seminar, please RSVP to law.scigl@usyd.edu.au for catering purposes.

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The Prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky

About the Topic

Mr Amsterdam will discuss the cases in which he has been acting as defence counsel for Mikhail Khodorkovsky.  His client, the former CEO of Russian oil company Yukos, was arrested in 2003 and charged with fraud and theft of Russian state property.  Mr Amsterdam will argue that in the criminal and tax proceedings the courts lacked independence, and did not adhere to Russian procedural and substantive law. Mr Khodorkovsky was found guilty and sentenced to 8 years prison. Mr Amsterdam will argue that treatment of Mr Khodorkovsky in prison has violated Russian and international law.  Mr Amsterdam will also discuss the new charges of money laundering and embezzlement brought against his client in February this year.  Mr Amsterdam has set out more details of the content of his presentation here .

About the Speaker

Mr Robert Amsterdam is a member of the Canadian and International Bar associations.  He holds a BA from Carleton University, Ottawa and an LLB from Queen’s University in Ontario.  He is the founding partner of the Toronto-based international law firm Amsterdam & Peroff.  In his 25 years of practice, Amsterdam has overseen numerous high profile cases including shareholder disputes, corporate restructuring, fraud and asset recovery, corporate and human rights advocacy, and complex commercial litigation.  He is also a specialist adviser on political risk.  In 2003, he was retained by the former CEO of Yukos Oils, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

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