This event was hosted by Cambridge Family Law Centre (CFL) on 7 March 2024. Speakers: Professor Laura Lundy (Queen’s University Belfast), Professor Anne Barlow (University of Exeter) & Dr Jan Ewing (University of Cambridge) When parents separate, children have the right to a voice in the decision-making per their article 12, UNCRC rights. However, evidence shows that this right is rarely upheld in England and Wales. Professor Lundy has developed the ‘Lundy Model of Child Participation’ (‘the Lun...
Mar 11, 2024•1 hr 15 min
Speaker: Dr Alvaro Fernandez-Mora, KCL Abstract: As trade marks have evolved to perform an expressive function, courts and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have devoted increased attention to elucidating when, and how, marks and speech interact. Three forms of interaction can be identified in European and US case law. First, in infringement litigation, a defendant can invoke speech with a view toward insulating from liability his unauthorized use of plaintiff’s mark for expressive purposes...
Mar 06, 2024•41 min•Ep. 137
Lecture summary: This lecture considers what Josef Kunz termed “swings of the pendulum” in international monetary and financial law and the formal and informal institutions in these related fields. International monetary law exploded in importance after the Second World War with the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a global system of managed exchange rates. With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and a decline in capital controls, the IMF evolved from a dominan...
Mar 04, 2024•39 min
Speaker: José Barroso, former President of the European Commission Biography: José Manuel Durão Barroso served twelve years in the Government of Portugal including as Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Minister. He was President of the European Commission during two mandates (2004/2014). His academic appointments include visiting professor at Georgetown University and visiting professor at Princeton University. He is currently a visiting professor at the Catholic University of Portug...
Feb 27, 2024•39 min•Ep. 134
On 23 February 2024 Professor Lusina Ho (University of Hong Kong) delivered the 2024 Cambridge Freshfields Lecture entitled "Re-imagining the Express Trust". Lusina Ho is Harold Hsiao-Wo Lee Professor in Trust and Equity at the Faculty of Law, the University of Hong Kong. While pursuing her teaching and research in Trust, Restitution, and Comparative Trust Law (in particular Chinese Trust Law), she has been consulted by the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the enactment of the Chi...
Feb 26, 2024•52 min•Ep. 19
The Cambridge Pro Bono Project (CPP) hosted the annual lecture featuring Professor Christine Chinkin, FBA. The Cambridge Pro Bono Project is a research centre that draws on the subject-matter expertise of graduate researchers and Faculty experts to produce reports on a wide range of public interest matters. Every year, we invite distinguished speakers to address our researchers, staff, and students at the University of Cambridge. This year's Cambridge Pro Bono Project Annual Lecture will be deli...
Feb 26, 2024•51 min•Ep. 21
Speaker: Professor Paul Deemer (Vanderbilt Law School) Abstract: This lecture will focus on the development and project financing of large international infrastructure projects, and will cover – - What is “project finance” and what is not? How does a “project financing” differ from other types of financing? - Why is project finance used on large infrastructure projects? What is “leverage,” and why is that important? - What legal structures and documents are commonly used in project financings? -...
Feb 14, 2024•37 min•Ep. 71
Lecture summary: This paper looks at the political purchase of International Conflict Feminism (ICF) in helping constitute the normative framework guiding and legitimizing laws and policies advanced under the rubric of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). It attends to how these have intersected with the work of the international criminal court (ICC) in new modalities of lawfare that have taken place against the backdrop of Security Council action, including its military interventions in Muslim m...
Feb 13, 2024•39 min
Speaker: Joanna Kusiak, Junior Research Fellow in Urban Studies at King’s College Bio: Dr Joanna Kusiak is a scholar-activist who works at the University of Cambridge. Born in Poland, she has been shaped by the emancipatory tradition of the Solidarność movement and by the brutality of the neoliberal transformation. Her work focuses on urban land, housing crises, and the progressive potential of law. In 2021 she was one of the spokespeople of Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen, Berlin’s successfu...
Feb 13, 2024•45 min•Ep. 14
Speaker: Thomas St Quintin, Hogarth Chambers Abstract: Lessons from the decision of the IPEC in Shazam v Only Fools the Dining Experience, and cases referred to in that decision, addressing the findings that copyright can subsist in fictional characters (and the factors that the court relied upon in reaching that conclusion), and the defences of fair dealing for the purposes of parody and pastiche. Biography: Thomas St Quintin is a barrister at Hogarth Chambers. He specialises in intellectual pr...
Feb 09, 2024•55 min•Ep. 136
Lecture summary: This research examines international law’s longstanding entanglement with communications infrastructure. There is increasing concern regarding the rise of private global power in the form of global digital platforms and their model of information capitalism. This paper responds by focusing on historical connections between international law and infrastructure as a means of examining their relationship in the global communications context. This reveals a longer trajectory to curr...
Feb 05, 2024•34 min
Speaker: Stuart Baran, Three New Square Abstract: The UK Supreme Court recently gave judgment in Thaler, upholding the refusal of patent applications listing DABUS, an AI, as the inventor. After looking at what the UKSC decided and why, I will consider three broader questions that arise from the litigation: (i) why did the case take the shape it did – in particular, was it driven by questions of procedure more than substance?; (ii) what does the judgment mean for patents arising from AI inventio...
Feb 02, 2024•43 min•Ep. 135
Bio: Oliver Wilson-Nunn is an Isaac Newton Research Fellow at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He recently completed his PhD on prison and film in Argentina at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge. He has published on prison education in contemporary documentary film and on prison writing from Cuba. He is broadly interested in the relationship between law, criminal justice, and culture in Latin America, with his new project focussing on the relationship between...
Feb 01, 2024•30 min•Ep. 13
Judges and jurists employ distinctive, and distinctly different, styles of reasoning. Judges develop the common law cautiously, by incremental analogical development. Judicial reasoning is characteristically practical, even pragmatic, with the resolution of concrete disputes paramount. The stability of the common law depends on strong shared, albeit implicit, understandings about its content. Academia might seem hostile to much of this. Academics are expected to build ambitious theories, to inve...
Jan 29, 2024•1 hr
Speaker: Professor Paul Wragg, University of Leeds Biography: Professor Paul Wragg is Professor of Media Law at the University of Leeds. He has written extensively on privacy and press freedom. His monograph on the compatibility of compulsory press regulation with press freedom was published by Hart in May, 2020. He is co-editor (with Professor András Koltay) of a collection of papers examining comparative privacy and defamation laws, published by Edward Elgar in July 2020 and was previously edi...
Jan 29, 2024•52 min•Ep. 134
Speaker: Associate Professor John Sorabji (UCL) The presentation will look at why England and Wales has, historically, been a 'good forum to shop in' for commercial dispute resolution. It will then consider four challenges to its ability to maintain that position, before turning to practical steps that could and, perhaps should, be taken to enable it to remain a forum of choice for commercial disputes. 3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the ...
Jan 23, 2024•35 min•Ep. 70
The government has recently announced that it intends to quash by legislation convictions of hundreds of subpostmasters who had been prosecuted by the Post Office for, variously, theft, fraud and false accounting. This follows a number of appeals which have already succeeded where it has been accepted that convictions that are based on generated by the Horizon software are necessarily unsafe. Usually, one would expect other subpostmasters to have to follow that same route, but the government is ...
Jan 23, 2024•17 min•Ep. 35
On 23 May 2014, Professor Philip Allott of the University of Cambridge addressed the Spring Conference of the International Law Association British Branch at the Inner Temple, London.
Jan 02, 2024•22 min
This is the first interview with Mrs Charity (Cherry) Hopkins, Life Fellow of Girton College, University of Cambridge. Mrs Hopkins was interviews for the first time on 13 September 2023 in the Squire Law Library. For more information, see the Squire Law Library website at http://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent-scholars-archive
Dec 20, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 37
Professor Campbell McLachlan was the Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor in Legal Science for 2022-2023. Professor McLachlan was interviewed for the second time on 13 September 2023 at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. For more information, see the Squire website at http://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent-scholars-archive
Dec 12, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 36
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to circumvent the UK Supreme Court's recent judgment holding the Government's Rwanda policy, concerning the removal of certain asylum-seekers, to Rwanda. The Bill contemplates placing the UK in breach of its international obligations, including under the European Convention on Human Rights and the Refugee Convention, while forming part of a policy that relies upon Rwanda's adherence to its own international obligations. The Bill is thus at...
Dec 07, 2023•12 min•Ep. 34
The Centre for European Legal Studies (CELS) hosts an annual public lecture in honour of Lord Mackenzie-Stuart, the first British Judge to be President of the Court of Justice. Among the eminent scholars of European legal studies invited to give the lecture are Professor Joseph Weiler, former Judge David Edwards of the European Court of Justice, and Advocate-General Francis Jacobs of the European Court of Justice. The texts of the Mackenzie-Stuart Lectures are published in the Cambridge Yearbook...
Dec 01, 2023•49 min•Ep. 13
Speaker: Martin Voitko (World Bank) Abstract: The Structured Finance seminar is intended to be a primer on understanding key concepts of these complex financial instruments and their benefits/limitations. The seminar will cover securitisation trades (both traditional (or cash) securitisations and synthetics) as well as covered bonds. The presentation will further explain what different types of those trades are used for as well as provide examples of typical structures. In the discussion part, t...
Dec 01, 2023•34 min•Ep. 69
Speaker: Eleanor Sharpston KC, Advocate General, CJEU (2006-2020) and Goodhart Professor, University of Cambridge (2023/2024) Abstract: The CJEU is a court that speaks through a single judgment, and that ‘dialogues’ with its Advocates General without ever saying quite what that dialogue means. What is the reader to make of the interplay between the individual opinion of the advocate general and the collective decision of the judges? The final seminar in the series asks some questions, suggests s...
Nov 29, 2023•42 min•Ep. 133
Speakers: João Vale de Almeida, Former Ambassador of the European Union to the United Kingdom (2020-2022) and Eleanor Sharpston KC, Advocate General, CJEU (2006-2020) and Goodhart Professor, University of Cambridge (2023/2024) Abstract: The UK and EU relationship has not been straight forward since Brexit but since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister a certain amount of pragmatism has prevailed. Meanwhile, the European Union is facing significant geo-political challenges – not least the war in Ukr...
Nov 24, 2023•41 min•Ep. 132
On 21 November 2023 Professor Rebecca Probert (University of Exeter Law School) delivered the second CELH annual lecture on the topic 'Women and the Crime of Bigamy in English Law, 1603-2023'. The Centre for English Legal History (CELH) was formally established in 2016 to provide a hub for researchers working in legal history across the University of Cambridge. The Centre holds regular seminars during academic terms, and an annual centrepiece lecture. To find out more, and download the accompany...
Nov 24, 2023•55 min•Ep. 6
Speaker: Professor Kent Roach, Professor of Law, University of Toronto This talk defined the distinct but overlapping concepts of miscarriages of justice, wrongful convictions and proven innocence. The three distinct and overlapping concepts are analysed as what Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt have called a 'tragic choice' approach to allocating scarce resources. For more information about the Cambridge Centre for Criminal Justice (CCCJ) see: https://www.cccj.law.cam.ac.uk/
Nov 22, 2023•53 min•Ep. 25
Lecture summary: In this talk, Lucas Lixinski examines the erasure of Indigenous perspectives from the literature on the turn to history in international law. Considering the turn to history’s promise to offer alternative imaginations by recovering history, it is somewhat surprising and disappointing that so much of this turn is narrated from the perspective of colonisers. Lixinski unpacks the implications of this turn to Indigenous agency and victimhood, and leverages alternative retellings of ...
Nov 20, 2023•34 min
On the 15 November the UK Supreme Court decided that the United Kingdom's policy of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda was unlawful. In this short video Dr Kirsty Hughes explains the Court's reasoning, and considers the Government's response and possible next steps. Kirsty Hughes is an Associate Professor specialising in Human Rights Law. She is joint General Editor of the European Human Rights Law Review, Director of the Centre for Public Law, University of Cambridge, a member of Blackstone Chamb...
Nov 16, 2023•14 min•Ep. 33
Speaker: Professor Chris Thomale (University of Vienna, University Roma Tre) Abstract: According to a widely received concept coined by Hansmann/Kraakman, “asset partitioning” denotes a bundle of doctrines surrounding the relationship of business owners as well as their business and private creditors, so-called entity shielding and owner shielding. Often, this configuration is associated with a legal entity, e.g., providing the “corporate veil” which allegedly protects owners’ assets from busine...
Nov 14, 2023•33 min•Ep. 68
