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Critical International Law Speaker Series

Convenors: Monica Garcia-Salmones and Wim Muller
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The aim is to invite leading Critical International Law scholars to Maastricht and discuss and debate cutting-edge questions in the theory of international law. Critical International Law has been indispensable in bringing contemporary questions on the relationship between international law and issues such as global justice, the legacy of colonialism, post-colonial globalisation, race, gender, the position of the Global South and the realignment of the global order to the attention of mainstream international legal scholars. The goal of the speaker series is to spark deep critical thinking on these questions. 

Prof. Anne Orford

Title: Some (Legal) Realism about Reparations in International Law

Anne Orford is Melbourne Laureate Professor and Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law at Melbourne Law School, and Visiting Professor of Law and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization at Harvard Law School. 

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Abstract

Abstract: International law is one site for the ongoing debate over whether, when, and by whom reparations should be paid for climate-related loss and damage.  The discussion of climate reparations often seems to treat international law as intervening only if it is used to redistribute such costs. Yet to ask whether international law should develop a liability regime for climate loss and damage ignores the fact that international law has already developed such a regime. International law has  been central to allocating the increasingly transboundary costs of industrialization, including those caused by climate change, since the 1940s. This talk will aim to make visible the ways in which legal decisions taken in different sites over that period have collectively contributed to making it seem inevitable that the costs of carbon-intensive industrialization will be allocated away from polluters and on to the states and peoples most vulnerable to the immediate effects of climate change.

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