Professor Gerry Simpson

Overview

Gerry Simpson is Professor of Public International Law at LSE and Fellow of the British Academy. He previously held the Sir Kenneth Bailey Chair of Law at the University of Melbourne Law School as well as a Soros-funded International Scholarship at the State University of Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied law at the University of Aberdeen, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) where he received his doctorate. Gerry has taught at the University of British Columbia, the University of Melbourne (where he was also Sir Ninian Stephen Visiting Fellow in 2004), the London School of Economics (2000-2009) and the Australian National University, and he has held visiting positions at Sydney Law School (1996), Harvard Law School (1999) and NYU (2018).

He is the author of Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004) (awarded the American Society of International Law's annual prize in 2005 for “Pre-eminent Contribution to Creative Legal Scholarship”, and translated into several languages), Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Polity 2008) and The Sentimental Life of International Law: Literature, Language and Longing in Global Politics (Oxford, 2021) as well as co-editor of The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials (ed. with Kevin Heller) (Oxford, 2013); Beyond Victor’s Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial Revisited (ed. with Yuki Tanaka and Tim McCormack))(Martinus Nijhoff, 2011) and Who’s Afraid of International Law (ed. with Raimond Gaita) (Monash University Press, 2017).

Gerry’s current work is an ARC-funded project on the Cold War and International Law (with Matt Craven (SOAS) and Sundhya Pahuja (Melbourne). International Law and the Cold War (eds. Craven, Pahuja, Simpson) was published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. Rival Legalities: Rethinking Cold War International Law is a monograph currently being written (with Craven and Pahuja) for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Gerry is also writing a philosophical meditation on nuclearism entitled: The Atomics: My Nuclear Family at the End of the Earth.

Gerry is the Joint Editor-in-Chief of The London Review of International Law and a regular essayist and contributor for Arena Magazine.