There is no question that the post-WW II international order is undergoing major challenges and disruptions. These disruptive forces have also placed enormous pressure on international law leading some to declare its death. However, there is also a growing counter-narrative which perhaps was best articulated by The Nobel Committee in announcing Navi Pillay as the 2026 Peace Prize recipient: "Nonetheless, we have seen that more and more conflicts are being addressed through diplomacy, treaties and legal mechanisms, rather than threats, violence and warfare. Leaders and populations alike have come to the same conclusion: international law is a foundation for a more peaceful world.” Nilufer Oral, director of the Centre of International Law at the National University of Singapore and a member of the UN International Law Commission, will examine how international law has constructed the foundation for peaceful order, and why it will continue to do so despite ongoing wars and attempts to dismantle the existing international institutional order conducted under the United Nations-based multilateral system.
Professor José Enrique Alvarez will be the interlocutor.
China’s rapid economic development in the absence of strong protections for property rights challenges conventional economic and legal theories. The regime’s ability to maintain not only political control but a significant level of popular support is another Chinese puzzle. Susan Whiting, a longtime scholar of rural China’s political economy, will share insights from her latest book, Illiberal Law and Development: Property Rights and Conflict Over Land in China. Whiting argues that the Chinese state uses law to reassign land rights in order to facilitate development of new sectors and that this analysis sheds new light on the development paths of other cases, including eighteenth-century England and contemporary India. All three states intervened to reassign property rights and spur economic development, but the states differ more significantly in their use of law to manage the resulting conflict.
Professor Whiting will join us live via Zoom and will answer questions from both the online audience and those in the room.
Corporate national identity used to be determined by relatively fixed and tangible factors such as where a corporation was incorporated, where its headquarters were located, or the nationality of its controlling shareholder. But as corporate identity increasingly intersects with national security concerns and geopolitical rivalries, it has become a subject of contestation and reassignment by unilateral government action, especially during cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Curtis Milhaupt, an expert on comparative corporate governance, will explore the ways in which corporations today are trying to control perceptions of their identity, while governments are intervening to reduce the perceived influence of rival states.
Professor Milhaupt will join us live via Zoom and will answer questions from both the online audience and those in the room.
