Dr Surabhi Ranganathan

Surabhi Ranganathan is a University Senior Lecturer in International Law, Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, and a Fellow of King‘s College, at the University of Cambridge. She is also a fellow of the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (C-EENRG), and an associate research fellow of the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge. 

Her research on the oceans, the history and politics of international law, treaties, and global governance has been published in leading journals including the European Journal of International Law, the British Yearbook of International Law, the American Journal of International Law and the Journal of the History of International Law; and selected for the peer-reviewed NYU/Nottingham/Melbourne Junior Faculty Forum for International Law and Stanford International Junior Faculty Forum. Ranganathan is also the author of a monograph, Strategically Created Treaty Conflicts and the Politics of International Law (Cambridge University Press), that was an EJIL Editors' Choice for 2015. Ranganathan was a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute, Geneva for spring 2020, and has been invited as a Global Professor at NYU School of Law. She will be a Visiting Fellow at the Center for History and Economics, Harvard in spring 2021. 

Ranganathan's current work traces the co-constitution of international law and the ocean from 1945 to now, unsettling what we take as the givens in relation to the spatial zones, resource allocations and functional jurisdictions effected by the law of the sea. It extends the history and critique of international law into new areas, such as ocean depths and bottoms, global commons, marine infrastructures, and techno-utopian imaginaries, and, from the underexplored vantage point of oceanic law-making, throws new light on current preoccupations of international legal histories: statehood and territory, decolonization and the new international economic order, the Cold War, race and empire, and the emergence of new legal forms and institutions. To know more about her research, you might read her interview, Garret Hardin, Arvid Pardo and the Fascinations of Interdisciplinarity (pp. 28-33); listen to her interview, Big Blue Juridical Planet on Fool's Utopia; hear the podcast of her talk Unmaking the Ocean delivered at Oxford, or watch the video of her Snyder Lecture: The Legal Construction of the Ocean at the University of Indiana. Short pieces authored by her include Techno-Utopia of the Deep on CUP's fifteeneightyfour blog; a sequence of seven short essays Interfaces of Land and Sea written as part of a project on Visualizing Climate and History hosted at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard; and an editorial Seasteads, Land-grabs and International Law for Leiden Journal of International Law. You might also enjoy this conversation on different approaches to international law between Professor Andrea Bianchi and her, hosted by the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg. 

Her first monograph, Strategically Created Treaty Conflicts and the Politics of International Law, was a study of international legal thought and practice, exploring treaty conflicts in nuclear governance, the law of the sea, and international criminal justice. To find out more, please look up the roundtable on the book hosted by Volkerrechtsblog, with contributions from Judge James Crawford, Professor Jan Klabbers, Dr Lea Wisken and Dr Jasper Finke, and a response from the author, or hear this recording. 

She received her B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) from the National Law School of India University, her LL.M. from NYU School of Law, where she was a Vanderbilt Scholar, and her Ph.D. from Cambridge University, where she was a Gates Scholar, an Overseas Research Scholar, and JC Hall Scholar at St. John's College. She has clerked for the Supreme Court of India, and interned with UNHCR, UNICEF, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, and the Central Empowered Committee for the Environment established by the Supreme Court of India. 

Ranganathan is an editor of the International Legal Theory Section of the Leiden Journal of International Law, and a notes editor of the Cambridge Law Journal. 

Her research is available on SSRN; she tweets at @SurabhiRanganat