Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures 2025: Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law: Continuing Conversations with Karen Knop

The Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture is an annual three-part lecture series given in Cambridge to commemorate the unique contribution to the development of international law of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. These lectures are given annually by a person of eminence in the field of international law.

We will come together to celebrate the life and scholarship of our colleague and friend, Professor Karen Knop (1960-2022). Karen, until her untimely passing, was the Cecil A Wright Chair at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. A long-time friend of the Lauterpacht Centre, Karen was to have delivered the Centre’s 2025 Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures.

The 2025 Lectures will take place on 13 and 14 March, over four special sessions, conversing with Karen’s extraordinary body of work across the history and theory of international law, gender and feminism studies, and private and foreign relations law. Four former HLM Lecturers will deliver these lectures in conversation with three discussants, all outstanding scholars mentored by Karen.

Recordings of these lectures are available at: https://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/lecture-recordings

Session I    History and Theory 

Professor Martti Koskenniemi in conversation with Dr Megan Donaldson

Chair: Professor Surabhi Ranganathan

Professor Koskenniemi’ s talk, 'Narrating International Society: Management of Pluralism according to Marcel Gauchet & Karen Knop’, will first address the emergence of the theme of a “law of an international society” in the 19th century, its use in the 20th century to support a managerial view of international institutions. It will then focus on the challenges that cultural and ideological pluralism poses to received ideas about the role of law in the government of domestic and international society. 

Dr Donaldson’s talk, ‘Gaze, Agency and International Society’, reads Karen Knop’s early work on self-determination as a repertoire of techniques for thinking collectivities and affiliations against and across states. The multiple and mobile perspectives she brought to bear, and the agency she glimpsed in disparate individuals and communities, pervaded much of her later work too, and remains open to, even generative of, renewed understandings of international society.

Martti Koskenniemi is Professor Emeritus of International law at the University of Helsinki. 

Megan Donaldson is Associate Professor of International Law at University College London. 

Session II    Gender and Feminism 

Professor Christine Chinkin in conversation with Dr Mai Taha 

Chair: Professor Sandesh Sivakumaran

Professor Chinkin’s talk, 'Self-determination for women through three encounters' will explore three encounters with Karen's Knop's work that illustrate how self-determination remains illusory in many instances for women and their responses that challenge the structures of international law: discriminatory laws with respect to the nationality of married women; the Tokyo Women's Tribunal; and the Greenham Common women's peace camp.

Dr Taha’s talk, ‘Ways of Seeing: On the Gendering Work of Law and Violence’ will provide comments and reflections in engagement with Professor Chinkin’s talk, and Professor Knop’s writings.  

Christine Chinkin, FBA, CMG is Emerita Professor of International Law at the LSE, Visiting Professorial Research Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security and Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan. 

Mai Taha is Assistant Professor of Human Rights in the Department of Sociology at the LSE.

There will be a coffee break at 4.45 pm. Sessions I & II will be followed by drinks in the Old Library.  

Session III    Private and Foreign Relations Law

Professor Anne Peters in conversation with Dr Roxana Banu

Chair: Professor Campbell McLachlan

Professor Peters’s talk, 'Populism, Foreign Relations Law, and global order and justice', will discuss populist foreign relations law, which was Karen Knop’s last project, at the university of Helsinki and as a Max Planck fellow. This talk will make the point that ongoing transformations of the concept of law itself, of legal procedures, and of legal substance cut across the ‘levels’ of governance. And neither identitarian rhetoric, nor trade wars, nor border-fences will bring back an inter-state, Westphalian (or ‘Eastfalian’) order. We are living in conditions of global law (and transnational) law. Populist heads of state both deploy and defy this law (concluding populist treaties or deals such as the German-Turkish refugee agreements; denouncing treaties such as ICSID or the Paris Agreement; using their war powers to escape domestic critique; raising tariffs to please their voter-base, and so on). At the same time, domestic, local and transnational actors (ranging from cities to courts to Indigenous peoples, or philanthro-capitalists) activate all kinds of law to resist populism. Such global lawfare destabilises world order but also has a transformative potential. New legal forms (especially informal agreements), new legal processes (such as public interest litigation before the ICJ) and new legal principles (such as One Health; Rectification/reparation; and the exposure of double standards) are responding to the big challenges for global order and justice: the cultural, the social, and the ecological challenge. 

Dr Banu’s talk, 'Foreign Affairs, Self-Determination and Private International Law', begins with the point that foreign affairs questions are often thought to lie at the very edge of private international law, perhaps in the leftover corners of the historical alignment between private and public international law. Similarly, in part on the assumption that private international law settles conflicts of laws between already established states, there wouldn’t appear to be any intuitive connection between nationalist or self-determination movements and the field of private international law.

This talk will show that these assumptions are mistaken. By engaging with the historical development of the field from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the talk will show that private international law has been deeply enmeshed in major geopolitical events generally, and in nationalist and self-determination movements, in particular. This enmeshment is neither accidental, nor exclusively modern. It is the inevitable result of some of private international law’s main analytical and conceptual building blocks. 

Anne Peters is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law Heidelberg (Germany), and Professor at the universities of Heidelberg, Freie Universität Berlin and Basel (Switzerland). 

Roxana Banu is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at the Faculty of Law and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford.

Session IV    Discussion and Q&A led by Professor Susan Marks 

Chair: Professor Antony Anghie

Professor Marks will lead the discussion of the three talks, teasing out cross-cutting themes and the enduring influence of Karen Knop’s scholarship across different fields of international law scholarship. 

Susan Marks is Professor of International Law at the LSE. 

There will be a coffee break at 10.45 am. Sessions III & IV will be followed by lunch in the Old Library.