But, John, for having me also thank you to the former organiser of the group Catalina.
I'm not sure if she's here with us today, but I'm very grateful to be here.
It's always been a bit of an ambition and a dream, I think,
for every international law to be invited to give a presentation at the Oxford Discussion Group.
I must confess that I didn't expect to be in my slippers when I was giving this presentation.
So that's quite an interesting and quite different take on my original idea of what this would be like.
But I'm very excited to be here from the comfort of my own home office to speak to all of you about my speech.
But more specifically, a section that deals with the use of obituaries to understand a bit more about the invisible
college of the international lawyers and of the international legal profession in general.
So I'm going to try to share my PowerPoint. I'm not really going to be.
Using it very much. But I have a couple of pictures, which I think will be interesting for us to look at together.
So really. So first of all, starting with the title.
I think what I want to persuade all of you today is that even though it is click bait,
it is much more than click bait to be looking at obituaries in of international lawyers.
I think that there are a lot of interesting insights to be gained from this exercise.
And what I hope to do with you today, rather than go into too much detail about the findings of my research on this issue.
We'll actually be talking more broadly about each method.
So different methods through which I looked at these obituaries and why I've done so.
And. Also, many debates that surround or the underlying thread of this presentation will be on the politics of method in international
legal research more broadly and why I believe that we should take a very that kind of debate very seriously.
So the idea of politics, of method is going to be underlying the whole presentation.
So I'm kind of leaning in to the teachings of especially black feminist authors like Bell Hooks or Audrey Lord.
I'm gonna be in there are a lot of white men in this presentation. So just just the start.
I think I'll owe you some some intersectional feminism.
Using stories is one of the best ways of getting people to engage with theory.
And this is what I'm going to try to do with you today as well,
which is I'm going to tell you the story of how I came about using obituaries and the ways in which I have
used them to shed light on the functioning and composition of the invisible College of International Lawyers,
not only to pull you into the discussion, but also as part of a deliberate move to a disclose my position naledi,
which I think is key in research in general and definitely in my research in particular and also.
This this move towards personalism and MTI scientism,
that kind of underlines also a bit of this exercise of unveiling the people behind the law, which is what my research tries to do.
So as my presentation has revealed at the beginning, I didn't study international law initially in the U.K.,
so my first degree was from Brazil, which is where I'm from.
And I will was always very much public international law feme.
So at the very beginning, I was doing the jesup.
I tried to do model United Nations and all of these things and a lot of things studying from international law
from the global south were relatively clear to me in the sense that the disparities of power between countries,
for example, and how some state practise counted more than others was always part of how international law was taught to us and how I understood it.
However, some things from the global south or from the semi periphery were invisible to me about the functioning and the making of international law.
One of them being. What are the actors that practise international law beyond diplomats, beyond the people acting for states rights?
So in 2013, I attended The Hague Academy course where I had the pleasure of being taught in the general course by James Crawford.
And what are the things that struck me was how he would come in to give the lectures straight across
the garden from where he was pleading on behalf of Australia in the whaling in the Antarctic case.
So this person was talking to us about his practise at the International Law Commission,
about his practise as counsel before the International Court of Justice,
whilst practising at the International Court of Justice during the during the course.
He was also in the audience. There were members of the court that would come to watch the lectures.
He would engage in banter with some of his opposing counsel, like Professor Alan Pilly, who was acting for Japan at the time.
So it was clear and also he offered to sign or copies of Bromley's principles, which we all had, that he edited.
And Ian Brownlee was his former page supervisor when they were both at Oxford.
So. That struck me as very interesting for many reasons.
First of all, it was my first kind of peering into you.
What does international law practise look look like beyond the roles of diplomats and what states do?
And also the absence of that window into this kind of personal social aspect of international law through textbooks,
especially if we're looking at sources of international law literature.
The emphasis is very much on it states, obviously.
And, of course, with good reason. But there is very little, if any, attention given to individuals,
individual members of the profession in the making of international law and in the practising of international law in mainstream literature.
So that was in the back of my mind when I started my page.
And I decided that I wanted to look into the role of individual international lawyers in the making of international law more generally.
And so I started to think a little bit about how I was going to do that.
So how was going to procure this information that wasn't perhaps easily found in this international decisions themselves?
Because obviously the majority of courts womb's otherwise other than through dissents in separate opinions, have judges names on the decision.
Right. So that's part of the anecdotes that people tell. But it's not really part of the mainstream discourse.
How how is that going to attain knowledge or be able to peer in to these these
relationships and the role that individuals might have in the making of international law,
what their careers, career paths look like, et cetera? So the first thing that I thought about was looking at rosters of international institutions.
And this is what many people that do very interesting work on the international legal profession,
like Dizzily Eve Dizzily and Bryant Garthe in commercial arbitration,
Sara Desailly works on international judges, specifically the International Criminal Court.
Daniel Ben, for example, works with building networks of arbitrators and looking at rosters.
And that was a very interesting way of going about it that I felt like a little bit of.
What I want to look at, which was the role that.
The double hatting or the Doublemint function, well, that Oscar Schachter mentions in his article in The Invisible College of International Lawyers.
What is missing from looking at individual rosters? So I needed something that would give me a little bit more insight into career paths.
And another thing that would be missing if I was looking at rosters would be this.
The mentorship, friendship and social elements of that is part of the profession,
so this idea that I mentioned that people are often in opposing sides of the same case at the International Court of Justice that often
chairs move around the that usually chair in the in the human wheel chair would move around in often in relationships or mentorship.
So if you think about Adorno, McNair and then here Lauterpacht,
that was obvious to me that there was some relevance to this and this would be missing if I was looking at individual rosters of courts.
So there is there are a lot of constraints that come with taking an institutional approach.
And then there was another option, which was to look at individual stories, undertaking, for example,
interviews that would allow me to look at anecdotes about the international legal profession and lived a little bit more of this human element.
However, a problem that that posed,
other than obviously the logistical issue and the training issue of undertaking such a large social legal style project such as this.
Would be that a lot of the people I wanted to talk about were no longer with us.
Right. Hence obituaries. The idea kind of came to me because I've always really enjoyed reading them.
So it's one of those really kind of weird obsessions that I had was to read obituaries published in specifically in the British,
your Book of International Law, which was the source that I used.
But also when Ian Bradley passed away, there was a series of obituaries entomologist published to him.
When I when I was an undergraduate and I remember reading that in different international law blogs,
and I was really fascinated by the human element that was always there.
And obituaries come with a set of limitations, of course, because they.
Specifically, if if by employing the British yearbook obituaries, which were the obituaries that I used,
you have restrictions in terms of nationality, etc., and biases that will happen if if you look at this type of source.
But I felt that complementing that with other studies, like the ones that I mentioned on Roster's,
I would be able to paint a really interesting picture that unveiled some other
aspects that wouldn't be available if I was looking at other types of sources.
So they allowed me a break, spent X amount of time, so from the 1920s to the present, in the case of the British yearbook,
they allowed me to look at the lives and the works of international lawyers, both dead and alive.
So the people that wrote the obituaries in that are still part of this network today.
They revealed association beyond a single institution or a series of international institutions.
And they also. Gave an insights into the relationships, personal relationships that I mentioned before.
Sometimes people mention that obituaries are particularly exaggerated form of that
might overstate the role that some individuals had in the making of international law.
And they have. I thought myself about the criticism that may emerge from that.
But one of the things that struck me as I was undertaking this research was that actually
there was a great degree of candour that came out in these types of contributions as well.
So there was a lot of exaggeration, I'm sure, in the adulation in the setting because of the very nature of the type of contribution.
But there was also a lot of candour. So I can give you two examples right now.
The first, the the men in the wig is Lord Phillimore,
who you may know from the draughting of the PCI J statutes, his obituary from nineteen twenty nine.
Both stated that he had a successful but not brilliant career at the bar,
alluding to the role of his father as an eminent member of the Admiralty Courts
as allowing for him to enter the profession through this particular way.
And his A also says that his career, his early career was supported by competence rather than by genius,
which I think is quite an interesting turn of phrase.
Another example of candour is of the man on the right of the screen, George Schwartz and Berger, whose obituary was published in nineteen ninety two.
And he is referred to as lacking tact to avoid treading on toes and the skill to apply bomb to the wounds he caused.
So I think that there is a lot of adulation, but also a lot of candour and a lot of interesting titbits that give you insights
into more about the international legal profession than one would perhaps expect.
So I began reading all of these obituaries and gathering information about them, about these people.
And I soon realised my original idea was that part of this exercise would result in
a family tree of sorts where I could kind of indicate where people worked and when,
but then who they were succeeded by who their lines of mentorship were, etc.
But. Over time, I realised that the relationships were much more complex than I initially anticipated.
And that in itself, it gives you a lot of food for thought.
But certainly it makes it a lot more difficult to translate these relationships into very simple binary.
This person was the mentor to that person. Kind of approaches that required a little bit of refinement.
And I anticipated. That I would need help with this.
I used one of my personal connexions in this case,
which is my co-author from the piece in the Leiden Journal that was linked in the invite's to this event,
which is Nicola Redeemers, who works on network analysis, his specific work.
He's at the University of Liverpool and his work specifically dealt with patterns of
citations in different international courts and tribunal and tribunals jurisprudence.
And speaking to him, I realised that that might be a very interesting way to gather the data that I found.
Of relationships between people and their career paths.
Using that same type of social network analysis technology to make a point about the invisible college.
So I'm gonna try to open. Another page.
We'll see how well we do with this. Because part of Nicolaas genius is that he managed to create an interactive version of the network as well.
So it's not just static. And it allows you to explore a lot of different aspects of different relationships and people's career paths over time.
So I'm going to try to share this screen with you.
See if that works, if you can see here in particular. I'll show you the full network first return to full network so you can see.
Here, the number of participants in the network.
There are a lot of things that you can learn from just the broad visual visualisation itself and you can read about that in the paper.
But one of the things that you can do very easily is zoom in to specific people.
And see what type in the strength of relationships that they had with other people.
So basically what Nicole and I did together was brainstorming the best way of displaying all this type of data, both about the individual nodes.
So the individual people that are here, but also their the connexions and the strength of connexions between actors.
So here, for example, you have Lord McNair, who was your chair of international law at Cambridge,
who was also a judge of the International Court of Justice in the European Court of Human Rights.
And you can see him connected here to research, Sir Hirsch Lauterpacht.
But also, for example, Max Huber here. You can see all of these people were mentioned in his obituary and in other obituaries as connected to him.
And you can see here the difference in strengths of connexions between people, so the relationship between him and Max Gruber was,
according to, of course, the information that isn't the obituaries, relatively inchoate.
So it's a quite a thin line, you can see between both of them.
Whereas his relationship with Lauterpacht was quite strong in comparison.
You can see the the thickness of the line here. That represents an higher number of ways in which these two people were said to have connected.
So US lines of succession in different educational and international institutions, mentorships, friendships, etc.
So the first. Point that we get to then is.
The role of empirical methods, right,
in investigating the profession and employing the empirical lens to look at the same the same set of information,
which are the obituaries and the type of things that we can learn from employing such a method.
So I think some of the conclusions that Nicole and I got to from employing such social network analysis are highlighted in the paper.
And I've already alluded to some of them here. The first one being the complexity of the relationships in question that kind of
defy or don't quite come through by nearly mere narration of these relationships.
Also, the fact that the relationships are relationships of mentorship, friendship, thick anonymity is successions and even family ties.
In some cases, they help illustrate narration and stories beyond anecdotes.
And in doing that, they allow us to unveil aspects of the profession that perhaps wouldn't be clear otherwise.
They also do something which I believe is very important, which is bolstering critiques for more diversity in the higher echelons of the profession.
Of course, as I said before, there is very little there is a lot to be said about the British nature of these relationships.
But we do see that there are other nationalities represented in the British yearbook, obituaries in their particularly relationships between with.
Members of the American and European Academy and a group of practise of international lawyers.
We have zero African members of this network, zero Latin American and one Asian person who was memorialised in the British yearbook.
Also, issues surrounding the representation of gender over time.
Only two obituaries of women were published in the British year book of over 70 that were published since the 1920s.
One of them being of Joyce Gutteridge, was the first woman legal adviser at the Foreign Office, and the other one,
Julian White, who was the first woman elected professor in mainland Britain, who was a professor at Manchester.
Other women do appear as connexions in the obituaries as well.
And you can read it a little bit more about that in our paper.
So this is kind of the empirical lens over obituaries, but they're also I also use them in other ways.
And one of them I called doctrinal implications of these obituaries.
Of course, the term doctrinal in itself is difficult to define.
I use it as a internal legal perspective aspect.
And in what way have I used obituaries from a doctrinal through a doctrinal lens?
Mainly to directly contradict the sources narrative that sees states as the main actors in international
law making or that deliberately in fact exclude individuals in the form of teachings of publicists,
for example, from mainstream lawmaking narratives. And you can see several examples of anecdotes in which people have been said to have
contributed to the development of specific legal provisions or legal doctrines you have here.
Sir Ian Sinclair, that worked at the Foreign Office and whose obituary is said in his obituary,
is said to have contributed to the acceptance of the commercial exception to state immunity cases.
And on the right here, we have Sir Clarence Will for Jenckes, who was director general of the International Labour Organisation,
in whose obituary mentions his role in contributing to the internal law of the ILO in particular, but of international organisations law in general.
So this is kind of the kind of the doctrinal implications or the directly legal implications that
can be that come through in obituaries that wouldn't otherwise perhaps be present in other sources,
such as judgements like I mentioned, where the role of individual judges is often obfuscated by the collective nature of the work.
It's the same case with, for example, the International Law Commission, where although you have a special rapporteur for each projects,
there might be variance into the extent to which certain people have contributed over time to a particular project into individual provisions.
In, for example, the articles on state responsibility end obituaries give a a little bit more insight into that and help illuminate that.
The third and final lens through which I have looked at obituaries and have used obituaries to fuel my research
on the role of individual members of the profession in the making of international law is a critical lens.
And when I say critical, again, I use that in quotation marks,
because what is critical research in a critical method in international law in particular is open to a lot of debate.
But what I do believe that obituaries do is they allow international lawyers to open their minds to the role of individuals in particular.
So of a big strand of critical literature such as David Kennedy and Marty Cuscuna.
Emmies is to open room for international lawyers as agents to be responsible for their own roles in the development.
The making and practising of international law.
And I believe that obituaries are right with stories of individual contributions, of stories,
of successes and failures that individuals have had in championing certain projects.
Also the development of certain sensibilities and our understanding of these sensibilities.
So bolstering critiques that. Call for more diversity in the profession,
more transparency in how we address the role of individuals in the making and the practising of international law,
their responsibilities in the ethics of international lawyers.
But I do believe that they also help us do that with a tone that is in listening and opens room for imagination.
So Isabelle really specifically has written about policing, policing, critique and the types of critique that are open to us in international law,
in the dangers and pitfalls of taking an exclusively negative, perhaps view of the discipline.
And what I believe that obituaries do is awaken us to the sensibilities that there is a lot of despair to be had.
But there is also a lot of room for imagination of the profession, imagination of new futures for the discipline,
empowerment in holding individuals responsible for their actions in this Milliyet.
And also, they allow one to employ perhaps a more subversive tone when talking about the lives of international lawyer.
So this personal tone. Breaks through this idea of international law as only something that is made in the abstract by states,
and it allows us to connect with it from a more personal perspective.
So my conclusions at last.
I've mentioned. That I looked through different lenses at one same object, which are obituaries of international waters,
the three lenses that I looked at them through are the empirical one in what I call doctrinal or more strictly legal one.
And a critical one. And I believe that all of these different lenses.
And looking at obituaries in particular gives us many insights into the profession.
The empirical lens allows us to map out the social network whereby ideas can move within international law and the relationships,
the complexity of relationships that exist between members of the profession.
It also allows us to have a better bird's eye view of the career paths that international lawyers take over time beyond a single institution.
And they also allow us to really see the lack of diversity in the international legal profession in general and bolster
critiques for increasing the role in the participation of certain groups in the high echelons of the profession.
From a doctrinal perspective.
Individual instances in which people have contributed to the development of the law in how they have done so allows us to critique,
understand and in in better understand the role of individuals in the making of international law,
which is largely absent from the literature on sources of international law and on international law making in general and from a critical lens.
Looking at obituaries allows us to think about the responsibility and the role of international members and international lawyers,
individual members of the profession.
It allows us ourselves to increase the transparency about how these individuals work and the way in which this group is organised.
It also allows us to connect with personal aspects of the profession, not just the negative sides,
but also the positive sides in a way that is and listening in allows for room for reimagine nation of the profession.
And also helps us switch a little bit of this narrative that international law is and should be impersonal,
it allows us to connect with the personal nature of the discipline, underlining this exercise.
As I mentioned before. There are issues, there are questions of method.
That's. That have come to me many times as I was undertaking this project,
the first one is something that Young Clobbers talks about in his 2013 speech at the European Society of International Law.
Conference, which was a need to move away from methodological fragmentation.
So focussing on the politics of method, as I did on this presentation,
showing that looking at the same object through different lenses can yield complementary but different results,
allowing for a fuller picture of something, an object of study.
B, the obituaries or any other object of study and international law allows us to transcend and discover more about our own objects of study.
In practise. I also hope to have through the narration of this long extended strenuous process of research have raised.
Raised some questions about the academic effort as a process rather than just something that is an outcome,
which is often what you get when looking at only the finished products of someone's research.
And also, the idea behind this presentation is to.
Talk a little bit more about the fact that often we benefit from moulding our
message on the basis of our research question and not the other way round,
so open it. Openness and cross pollination between different methodological lenses can actually be an extremely worthy exercise.
So I hope that you enjoyed my presentation.
I have concluded it. And if you have any questions, I would.
I would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you. Thank you, Louise.
That's really in a creative and informative presentation.