Date & time
Venue
Phillipa Weeks Library, Level 4, Building 7, ANU Law School
Register for the event
Event description
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s January 2026 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos announced “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality.” While some criticized Carney for not objecting vocally to U.S. violations of international law during the first year of the second Trump Administration (let alone past U.S. selectivity and inconsistency), others applauded his willingness to state what many in attendance had been thinking: that the fantasy of shared values underpinning the U.S.-led rules-based international order is untenable in the face of undisguised U.S. contempt for such values. Professor Chimène Keitner will use her forthcoming symposium contribution on Principled Reason-Giving and the Use of Force as a starting-point for a conversation about the lack of guardrails in the U.S. foreign affairs and defense bureaucracy and how other countries can navigate the U.S. threat to international law.
Note: Registration is not required for this event.
Speakers
Professor Chimène Keitner
Professor Chimène Keitner is a leading authority on international law and civil litigation, and served as the 27th Counselor on International Law in the U.S. Department of State. She has authored two books and dozens of articles, essays, and book chapters on questions surrounding the relationship among law, communities, and borders, including issues of jurisdiction, extraterritoriality, foreign sovereign and foreign official immunity, and the historical understandings underpinning current practice in these areas.
Professor Keitner holds a bachelor’s degree in history and literature with high honors from Harvard, a JD from Yale, where she was a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, and a doctorate in international relations from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
Among other professional service, Professor Keitner has served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law and as Co-Chair of the ASIL International Law in Domestic Courts Interest Group. She is a member of the American Law Institute and an Adviser on the ALI’s Fourth Restatement of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. She is also a founding co-chair of the International Law Association’s Study Group on Individual Responsibility in International Law.