Speaker

 :

Professor Christine Bell, Professor of Constitutional Law, niversity of Edinburgh (Edinburgh Uni profile)

Date

 :

Friday 17th February 2012

Time

 :

1pm (with a sandwich lunch, sponsored by Cambridge University Press, from 12:30pm)

Venue

 : 

Finley Library, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, 5 Cranmer Road, Cambridge 

Lecture Summary: This lecture will address the ways in which peace settlements and the process of implementation that surround them have impacted on international law, reshaping traditional understandings of areas such as self-determination law, use of force, and human rights and humanitarian law. Though the lecture it will be argued that there is an emerging ‘lex pacificatoria’ or ‘law of the peacemakers’ with a similar ‘legal status’ to the lex mercatoria as a normativised practice. However, this law is partial and unstable, and different possibilities for its future trajectory will be explored, with relevance for current debates about contemporary ‘situating’ of international law in its post-Westphalian dimensions.

Christine Bell is Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Edinburgh. She read law at Selwyn College, Cambridge (1988) and gained an LLM in Law from Harvard Law School (1990), supported by a Harkness Fellowship. In 1990, she qualified as a Barrister at law. She subsequently qualified as an Attorney-at-law in New York, practicing for a period at Debevoise & Plimpton, NY. From 1997-9 she was Director of the Centre for International and Comparative Human Rights Law, Queen's University of Belfast, and from 2000-2011, she was Professor of Public International Law, and a founder and Director of the Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster.

Her research interests lie in the interface between constitutional and international law, gender and conflict, and legal theory, with a particular interest in peace processes and their agreements. In 2007 Christine won the American Society of International Law's Francis Deake Prize for her article on 'Peace Agreements: Their Nature and Legal Status' 100(2) American Journal of International Law 373 (2006). The prize is awarded annually for the leading article by a younger author in the AJIL She has authored two books: On the Law of Peace: Peace Agreements and the Lex Pacificatoria (Oxford University Press, 2008) which won the Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize, awarded by the Socio-legal Studies Association UK, and Peace Agreements and Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2000). She has also authored the a report published by the International Council on Human Rights Policy entitled 'Negotiating Justice? Human Rights and Peace Agreements' (2006).

Relevant publications:

On the Law of Peace: Peace Agreements and the Lex Pacificatoria (OUP, 2008) [OUP website | Oxford Scholarship Online]

Peace Agreements and Human Rights (OUP, Oxford 2000) [OUP website]

'Peace Agreements: Their Nature and Legal Status', 100 (2) American Journal of International Law 373 (2006) [HeinOnline (Subscription required)].