Date & time
Venue
Phillipa Weeks Library, Level 4, Building 7, ANU College of Law
Contact
Event description
How may we approach peoples’ tribunals in relation to international law? Are they simply spaces of politics for better law? Or are they doing more on the international legal domain? In this talk, I explore the place of legal institutions organised by ‘peoples’ rather than States on the international arena. I do so through a project on the International Rights of Nature Tribunal. This tribunal constituted itself through a Peoples’ Convention in Paris in 2015, giving form to an ‘international legal institution’ outside the international legal order. Turning to this moment of institution building, I stage a reading against another institutional moment in international law: the crafting of the League of Nations, taking place in the same city shy of hundred years prior. I dwell on the conceptions of ‘nature’, ‘peoples’, ‘colonialism’, ‘race’, ‘jurisdiction’ and ‘statehood’ that arose. I consider how these acts of institution building, in a remarkably similar way, laid claim to different international legal communities by making references to nature. I intentionally complicate the line between peoples’ tribunals and international law, inviting reflexivity about what it means to speak law in the name of an international community – be it as States or ‘peoples’, or ‘nature’ itself.
Speakers
Featured Speakers
Tim Lindgren is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL) and a member of the Sustainable Global Economic Law (SGEL) research project. He researches and teaches in international law. His research lies at the intersection of public international law, the environment and colonialism, with a particular attention to the performance of international law in informal spaces. At Amsterdam Law School, Tim is developing a project that theorises the relationship between place and international law, with particular attention to how international courts and tribunals frame State obligations for environmental harm and climate change. Prior to joining Amsterdam, Tim was a sessional Lecturer at Melbourne Law School where he completed his PhD. He has been a returning lecturer for the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights at the University of Oxford and a Teaching Fellow at Melbourne Law School, and has given lecturers in a rage of areas at institutions such as University of Cambridge, The New School in New York and Osgoode Hall Law School. He has also held visiting positions elsewhere, most recently at Melbourne Law School’s Laureate Program on Global Corporations and International Law and the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge.