The international law of financial crime – money laundering, terrorist financing, proliferation financing and sanctions evasion – is more influential domestically and significant internationally than ever before. Still, its origins, evolution and operation remain an obscure specialism for most lawyers. A new book, Doing Business with Criminals, traces the history of these rules and provides an account of the challenges they engender.

Dr Susan Bartie is a passionate socio-legal historian at the ANU Law School. She is currently working on a 50-year history of Australian environmental lawyers (both academic and practising). This project builds on her prior studies of the discipline of law and is part of her broader academic agenda: to strengthen the empirical dimensions of law and better integrate them into mainstream legal studies and cognate disciplines.

This month CIPL is delighted to announce the publication of a major new report that we hope will shape policy thinking in Australia and globally. The report is entitled War Funders and Profiteers: Economic Complicity in International Crimes in Ukraine and Beyond and, as the title suggests, it takes on the crucial but under-explored issue of international criminal responsibility of those who fund international crimes – war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression – or profit from them.