Dr Anna Saunders is a Lecturer at the ANU Law School. She researches in international law, the history and theory of property, and the political economy of science and technology. Her current work explores transformations of intellectual property and of legal frameworks for scientific and technological cooperation in the context of a climate-changed world. In 2024, she received the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law Article Prize for her article on international law and the political economy of constitution-making. She is a founding member and the inaugural Chair of the Law, Science, and Technology in Society Hub (LSTS Hub) at ANU Law School, and a member of ANU’s Capitalism Studies Network and the Centre for International and Public Law. From October 2026, she will be an Affiliated Scholar with the Laureate Program on Global Climate Corporate Accountability at Melbourne Law School.
Anna’s work has been published in the American Journal of International Law, Transnational Legal Theory, and as chapters in edited volumes with leading university presses. She was a co-editor of the volume Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917, published with Cambridge University Press. She has been invited to give seminars on her research at Edinburgh Law School, Warwick Law School and Amsterdam Law School, and to teach in the Semaine doctorale intensive at Sciences Po Law School. She serves as Book Reviews Editor at the Journal of Law and Political Economy, and as a member of the governing board of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property (ISHTIP) (2025–2030).
Anna obtained her doctorate from University College London, where she was a Modern Law Review Scholar, a Graduate Lecturer in Property Law, and the recipient of a London Arts and Humanities Partnership studentship from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. She holds a JD (first class honours) and MPhil from Melbourne Law School, where she was an editor of the Melbourne Journal of International Law, and an LLM from Harvard Law School, where she was a Frank Knox Fellow. She has served as an associate to Justice Susan Kenny AM at the Federal Court of Australia, and is admitted as an Australian lawyer and an officer of the Supreme Court of Victoria.
Areas of Expertise
- International Law, Science and Technology
- International Law and Intellectual Property
- International Law and Climate
- Public International Law
- Law and Political Economy
- Legal History
- Legal Theory
Academic Memberships
- Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law
- European Society of International Law
- International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property
View more publications on the ANU Researchers website
Link to ANU researchers profile
Dr Anna Saunders researches in international law, the history and theory of property, and the political economy of science and technology. She is particularly interested in transformations of intellectual property and of legal frameworks for scientific and technological cooperation in the context of a climate-changed world. She is currently working on a monograph project based on her doctoral thesis. The monograph explores how international law served as a means for translating changing ideas about human relations with the natural world into the legal setting of the patent form during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and argues that attending to this process of translation can offer paths for the reworking of that form in the present.
In 2025, she co-convened a workshop (with Dr Wanshu Cong) on ‘International Law and Technology from Below’. The workshop brought together leading Australian and international scholars working across law, history, and sociology to explore histories of, and present strategies for, reimagining international lawmaking for technological change. She is also currently working on a project on international law, climate science, and the rise of far-right politics.
Anna has published widely in the history, theory and political economy of international law, including work on international law-making on transnational corporations; the history and political economy of international constitution-making; and European human rights and revolutionary history.
Representative research publications include:
- Anna Saunders, ‘International Courts Against the Defunding of Climate Science? Revisiting the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on Climate Change’ on EJIL:Talk! (21 July 2026).
- Anna Saunders, ‘Reserving Time: Third Parties and Temporal Orders in Industrial Property Lawmaking’ in José Bellido, Marius Buning, Allison Fish and Brad Sherman (eds), The Future of Intellectual Property: A History (under contract with Oxford University Press)
- Anna Saunders, International Law as Industrial Discipline: Patent Form and Legal Transformation (PhD Thesis, University College London 2025).
- Anna Saunders, ‘Allende’s Workshop: Technological Diplomacy and the Stakes of Solidarity’ CIL Dialogues (20 December 2023) (published in Spanish as ‘La Diplomacia Tecnológica y los Retos de la Solidaridad’ Agenda Estado de Derecho (4 March 2024, Natalia Morales Cerda trans).
- Anna Saunders, ‘Constitution-Making as a Technique of International Law: Reconsidering the Postwar Inheritance’ (2023) 118 American Journal of International Law 251.
- Anna Saunders, ‘Law after Dominium: Thinking with Martti Koskenniemi on Sovereignty, Property and Transformation’ (2023) 13 Transnational Legal Theory 475.
- Kathryn Greenman, Anne Orford, Anna Saunders and Ntina Tzouvala (eds), Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
- Sundhya Pahuja and Anna Saunders, ‘Rival Worlds and the Place of the Corporation in International Law’ in Philipp Dann and Jochen von Bernstorff, The Battle for International Law: South–North Perspectives on the Decolonization Era (Oxford University Press, 2019) 141.
Dr Anna Saunders has supervised undergraduate and postgraduate dissertation projects to completion and serves as a panel member for doctoral thesis research at the ANU. She welcomes inquiries from prospective doctoral researchers and undergraduate and postgraduate dissertation students seeking supervision in her areas of expertise.
Areas she is willing to supervise in include:
- International Law and Property (especially Intellectual Property)
- International Law, Science and Technology
- International Law and Climate
- History and Theory of International Law
- Law and Political Economy
- Critical Approaches to Property
- Legal History
At the ANU, Dr Anna Saunders teaches courses in public international law; property law; law, science and technology; and international law and climate change. Prior to commencing at the ANU, she also taught courses in legal history and legal pedagogy, and maintains a particular interest in the relationship between pedagogical practice and the history and social role of the law school. With Dr Elizabeth Sheargold, she is the current co-chair of the ANZSIL International Law Teaching Interest Group.
In Semester 2, 2026, her office hours are from 4pm to 6pm on Tuesdays during the Winter teaching period (until 15 September). Supplementary office hours for students taking Winter intensives will be posted on the relevant Canvas page.
In 2026 she is teaching the following courses:
- Principles of International Law (LAWS8182 Winter Session)
- Property Law (LAWS2204/6204)
- International Law, Science and Technology (LAWS4358)
