Professor Kate Miles

Dr Kate Miles is Professor of Law, W.M. Tapp Fellow in Law, and Director of Studies in Law at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. She engages in both doctrinal and critical legal theory research. She has published extensively on the relationship between international investment law and climate change mitigation measures. Her research in international investment law also engages with historical and postcolonial approaches to the subject. Her more recent research explores the visuality of international law. She is the author of a monograph published in 2013 (paperback edition published in 2015) in the Cambridge University Press series, Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law, entitled: The Origins of International Investment Law: Empire, Environment and the Safeguarding of Capital. She is also the co-editor (with Chester Brown) of Evolution in Investment Treaty Law and Arbitration (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Prof Miles is a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, University of Cambridge. She has served on the International Law Association’s Study Group on the Role of Soft Law Instruments in International Investment Law and coordinated the international investment law network for the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL). She served as the Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law, University of Sydney, and acted as a consultant to APEC, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) on matters related to investor-state arbitration and climate change. She has spoken at meetings of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Geneva, the United Nations Leading Group on Solidarity Levies to Fund Development, and at the 2009 Copenhagen Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 15). She has also been engaged as an expert witness in litigation involving environmental impact assessment requirements in the South Pacific. Prof Miles has served on the Editorial Board and as General Editor of the London Review of International Law, on the International Advisory Board of the Chinese Journal of Environmental Law, and as a Faculty Advisory Board Member for the Cambridge International Law Journal.

As an undergraduate in law and arts at the University of Auckland, she studied law, art history, philosophy and ancient history. She holds a B.A. in Art History, LL.B., and an LL.M. in Environmental Law (Hons I) from the University of Auckland, an LL.M. in International Legal Studies from NYU School of Law, and a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney. She was the recipient of the Stout Shield for Mooting, the Geoffrey Powell Prize, and the Gary Davies Medal as an undergraduate in law at the University of Auckland. She was awarded an Australian Postgraduate Award studentship to pursue her doctorate at the University of Sydney on the interrelationship between international investment law and principles of environmental protection. She also practiced for several years in the litigation departments of leading commercial law firms in Auckland and Sydney, including at Allens Arthur Robinson (now Allens Linklaters).