Originating a Field - The Law of Foreign Investment: In Conversation With Professor M. Sornarajah

Room 609, Level 6, Mebourne Law School

In this evening event, Professors Antony Anghie (National University of Singapore, Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law at the University of Utah, and author of Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law) and Sundhya Pahuja (Director of IILAH, author of Decolonising International Law:Development, Growth and the Politics of Universality) will engage in a conversation with Professor Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah. At a time when international uncertainty is particularly acute, Professor Sornarajah will be invited to reflect upon his exceptional career in international law, his commitment to addressing global inequality, his origination of the field of the international law of foreign investment, and to his critical engagement with the enduring Eurocentricity of international law.

Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah is CJ Koh Professor at the Faculty of Law of the National University of Singapore. He is Visiting Professor at the Centre for Human Rights, London School of Economics, and has previously served as the Tunku Abdul Rahman Professor of International Law at the University of Malaya at Kuala Lumpur, and the Head of the Law School of the University of Tasmania, Australia. His extensive body of publications includes The Pursuit of Nationalized Property (Martinus Nijhoff, 1986); International Commercial Arbitration (Longman, 1992); The Law of International Joint Ventures (Longman, 1994); The International Law on Foreign Investment (Cambridge University Press, 1996, with a fourth edition in 2015); The Settlement of Foreign Investment Disputes (Kluwer, 2001) and Resistance and Change in the International Law on Foreign Investment (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Professor Sornarajah was the Director of the UNCTAD/WTO Programme on Investment Treaties, Pretoria and New Delhi. He is a member of the Advisory Boards of the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, the Indian Journal of International Law and several other international journals. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Columbia Centre Sustainable Investment. He is a Fellow of the Australian Centre for International Commercial Arbitration.

Antony Anghie is Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore. Professor Anghie is the author of Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and a leading figure in the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement.

Sundhya Pahuja is Director of the Institute of International Law and the Humanities at Melbourne Law School.  Professor Pahuja’s book, Decolonising International Law: Development, Growth and the Politics of Universality won the American Society of International Law prize in 2012, and the Woodward Medal in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2014.