Professor Anne Orford

Overview

Anne Orford is Melbourne Laureate Professor and Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law at Melbourne Law School, and Visiting Professor of Law and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization at Harvard Law School. She researches and teaches in the areas of international law, international dispute settlement, international economic law, climate change, and the history and theory of international law. She is a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a past President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. She is a Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and has been an international expert adviser on climate change and international law to the Pacific Islands Forum.

In addition to visiting at Harvard Law School since 2019, Professor Orford has been a Visiting Professor of Law at Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Hedda Andersson Visiting Chair at Lund University, the Raoul Wallenberg Visiting Chair in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Torgny Segerstedt Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg, and Senior Emile Noël Research Fellow at NYU School of Law. She presented a special course on Civil War and the Transformation of International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law in 2021. She has been appointed by the Swedish Research Council as the Olof Palme Visiting Professor at Stockholm University in 2024, where she will lead a project on the securitization of climate change.

Her latest book, International Law and the Politics of History (Cambridge University Press, 2021), was awarded the 2022 European Society of International Law Monograph Prize for Excellence in International Law Scholarship. She is also the author of Pensée Critique et Pratique du Droit International (Pedone, 2020), International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and has edited numerous collections, including The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2016) (with Florian Hoffmann).

Professor Orford has been awarded honorary doctorates in law by Lund University, the University of Gothenburg, and the University of Helsinki, the Woodward Medal for Excellence in Humanities and Social Sciences by the University of Melbourne, and three Australian Research Council fellowships, including the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellowship. She has presented over 50 named public lectures, keynote speeches, and plenary addresses, including at conferences of the American Society of International Law, the Asian Society of International Law, the Australian Historical Association, the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law, the European Society of International Law, the French Society of International Law, the Korean Society of International Law, and the US Law and Society Association.

Over the past three decades, Professor Orford has supervised a group of dynamic doctoral and postdoctoral researchers who have gone on to become leading international legal scholars and practitioners. She has established and directed two influential research groups as Foundation Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities and Director of the Laureate Program in International Law, both at Melbourne Law School. She has also made a significant contribution to research training and mentoring for early career researchers in her field globally, including as founding co-convenor of the Annual Junior Faculty Forum for International Law. As Director of the Laureate Program in International Law, she created a global visiting fellowship program that enabled 27 outstanding early career researchers to come from Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, the UK, and the US to work with her team in Melbourne.