Early Career Workshop on History, Critique, and International Law

10-11 March 2016

Each year the Laureate Program in International Law brings to Melbourne Law School a series of visiting professorial and professional fellows to work with the project researchers. The Laureate Program will host an early career workshop with each visiting professorial or professional fellow. At those workshops, Laureate program researchers, Kathleen Fitzpatrick fellows, and selected early career researchers undertaking related projects will explore the tradition, field, or milieu in which that scholar or practitioner works, and think through ways of engaging with that tradition in our collective research. The Laureate Program's first Visiting Professorial Fellow, Martti Koskenniemi, has profoundly shaped both historical and critical work in international law over the past decades. His visit in March 2016 provided the perfect opportunity to launch the Laureate Program with a workshop thinking through the stakes of the encounter between history, critique, jurisprudence, and international law. 

The workshop included a series of panels at which senior scholars from law (Ann Genovese, Martti Koskenniemi, Shaun McVeigh, Anne Orford, and Peter Rush) and history (Joy Damousi and Barbara Keys) reflected upon the process of undertaking research that moves across or between law, history, internationalism, and social and legal theory. It also featured a series of work-in-progress panels with doctoral and postdoctoral scholars either working with the Laureate Program or at Melbourne Law School on projects that share the methodological, theoretical, substantive, or critical concerns of the Laureate project. The presenters were joined by other interested JD and doctoral students and early career scholars from law and the humanities who took part in the discussions. Participants were provided with a list of suggested reading to introduce the work of the senior scholars taking part in the workshop, and short summaries of the presentations made by the early career scholars. 

The workshop program is available here, the list of suggested reading is available here, and the presenter bios are available here.