LCIL Friday Lecture: 'Beckoning Choices: A Theory of Authority in International Law' - Prof Fuad Zarbiyev, Geneva Graduate Institute

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Situations in which claims to authority clash with each other abound in international law, ranging from competition for authority among international adjudicative bodies to the disputed allocation of powers among international and domestic authorities across various issue areas. What is common to all these situations is that each claim to authority is typically supported by some formal or informal basis for eliciting deference. Yet the practice shows that not all claims to deference entitlement are situated on the same plane, with some exerting greater attraction than others. Exclusively mandate-based authority claims, for instance, rarely gain the upper hand over epistemically grounded claims to deference. Moving away from the actor-focused conception of authority that prevails in the literature, this talk will argue that competing claims to authority in the international legal order are generally adjudicated on the basis of the deference pull of the authority attributes of the different alternatives at play. If, as this talk postulates, authority is a function of deference-entitling properties, examining how competing claims to authority are typically resolved in international law is likely to unveil much about the principles and values that the international legal order promotes.

Fuad Zarbiyev is Professor of International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He is the recipient of the James Crawford Prize in International Dispute Settlement and the Prize for Best Article in International Dispute Resolution of the Dispute Resolution Interest Group of the American Society of International Law. He has served as Director of Studies at The Hague Academy of International Law and has held visiting appointments at the Sciences Po Law School in Paris and at Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

Chair: Dr Fernando Lusa Bordin

There is a sandwich lunch at 12.30 pm in the Old Library at the Centre before the lecture. All lecture attendees are welcome.

The Friday Lunchtime Lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press & Assessment.