LCIL Friday Lecture: 'From Drivers to Bystanders: The Varying Roles of States in International Legal Change' - Dr Nico Krisch, Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies

LCIL International Law Seminar Series

Lecture summary: International law is in constant movement, and any proper account of the international legal order needs to place this movement at the centre. “The course of international law needs to be understood if international law is to be understood,” says James Crawford in the opening of his general course at the Hague Academy in 2013. Yet rarely do we find focused and systematic attention to this ‘course of international law,’ to the ways in which international legal rules change, get reaffirmed or disappear. In this paper, we take a step towards a broader account of these dynamics, and we interrogate in particular the varying roles states play in them – largely from an empirical, not a doctrinal starting point. We pay particular attention to contexts in which states take secondary roles in change processes – roles of bystanders, catalysts, or spoilers – and we outline two core factors which, we believe, can help us understand much of the variation we observe. With this, we hope to dispel some of the shadows cast by doctrinal representations and make progress on the way to on the way to developing a richer, more empirically-oriented and more ‘social’ account of the paths of international law. The paper results from a research project on “The Paths of International Law”, funded by the European Research Council, and it is co-authored with Ezgi Yildiz, postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. Dr Nico Krisch is a professor of international law at the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies. His main research interests concern the legal structure of international organizations and global governance, the politics of international law, and the postnational legal order emerging at the intersection of domestic, transnational and international law. Prior to joining the The wInstitute, he was an ICREA research professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals and held faculty positions at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and the Law Department of the London School of Economics. He was also a research fellow at Oxford University’s Merton College, at New York University School of Law and at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, as well as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School. He holds a PhD in law from the University of Heidelberg. His 2010 book, Beyond Constitutionalism: The Pluralist Structure of Postnational Law (OUP), received the Certificate of Merit of the American Society of International Law. Dr Krisch is a member of the Council of the International Society of Public Law, and of the editorial/advisory boards of the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Dispute Settlement, and the London Review of International Law. In 2017, he was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant for a project on change and stability in international law; in 2019, he received the inaugural Max Planck-Cambride Prize for International Law.