Mr Leonardo Souza-McMurtrie

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Fitzwilliam College
  • Research student
Mr Leonardo Souza-McMurtrie

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About

I’m doing my PhD at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, where my research explores the theory of international law, especially when it seems to turn against itself. Before this, I completed an LL.M. at Queen Mary University of London as a Chevening Scholar, graduating top of my class and receiving the best dissertation award. That research focused on the cultural psychology of investment law. I first trained in law in Brazil.

Alongside my academic work, I remain active as an international lawyer, qualified in Brazil, England, and Wales. I often serve as secretary to arbitral tribunals, though I also act as counsel or consultant, with a focus on sectors like oil and gas, investment, and infrastructure across a range of institutional rules. I have experience with institutions such as the ICC, ICDR, CAM-CCBC, and DIAC; edited for the Cambridge International Law Journal; presided over the Cambridge University Arbitration Society; and co-founded an arbitration centre in Northern Brazil.

I’ve published several articles on international arbitration, covering topics such as corruption, artificial intelligence, disputes involving state entities, and broader theoretical questions about international dispute resolution. My work moves between theory and practice, between rules and the real-world mechanisms that try, and sometimes fail, to hold them together.

Selected Grants & Honours

  • Fitzwilliam College Senior Scholarship Award, University of Cambridge (2024)
  • David Haywood Award, Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge (2024)
  • Yorke Award, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge (2024)
  • Gates Cambridge Scholarship (2023)
  • Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholar Award, Cambridge (2023)
  • Cambridge International Trust Scholar Award, Cambridge (2023)
  • Comparative and International Dispute Resolution (CIDR) Prize, Queen Mary University of London (2019/2020)
  • Chevening Award, UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (2019)
  • Motion of Applause, Amazonas House of Representatives (2017)
  • Multiple Moot Court Competition Awards (Champion, Best Oralist, Best Memoranda) (2015, 2016)

Research

International law, International Arbitration, Philosophy

Thesis: Negative International Law

What if the law itself is the ultimate form of illegality?

Rules shape everything: what you wear, what you eat, the planes you fly in. Thousands of people must cooperate under shared rules for any of this to work. We rely on these norms to produce a coherent whole, like a machine that takes behaviour as input and returns a verdict: legal or illegal.

This engine runs on binary code, classifying the world into dualities: public and private, sovereign and subject, land and sea, crime and punishment, war and peace.

But sometimes it produces a result that cannot be traced back to its own logic. A conclusion that breaks free from the premises on which it was built. I research these moments of rupture, where international law loops back on itself, contradicts its own foundations, and escapes the very rules it claims to impose. From oil investment contracts in the 1960s Middle East, to the fallout of 9/11 in humanitarian law, from Japanese control of the South Pacific, to the race for wealth in outer space, I trace these paradoxes.

I search for a theory of law that insists on negating itself.

Neither positivism nor structuralism can quite explain it. But thinkers like Hegel, Žižek, and Badiou might have seen it coming. These contradictions are not exceptions, I think. They appear when positive law reaches its limit. And once this happens, I wonder — what remains?

Supervisor(s): Prof. Lorand Bartels

Research centres: Cambridge Forum for Legal and Political Philosophy (CFLPP); Cambridge Legal Theory Discussion Group (CLTDG); Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL)