Professor Margaret A Young FAAL

Overview

Professor Margaret A. Young is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow, Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) at Melbourne Law School, and Director of Studies of the International Law Association (Australian branch). She specialises in public international law, the law of the sea, international trade law, climate change and environmental law. Her latest research project investigates the promise of the blue economy, and specifically whether treaties and other international instruments make good on its proposed alignment with environmental and human welfare goals. Her recently completed ARC project, which she co-led with Professor Hilary Charlesworth (now Judge on the International Court of Justice) considered ‘The Potential and Limits of International Adjudication’, and led to significant research outputs, including an analysis of the advisory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, which was short-listed for the Australian Legal Research Awards 2023.

Margaret’s award-winning work on climate change, international environmental law and the law of the sea includes her co-authored book,  The Impact of Climate Change Mitigation on Indigenous and Forest Communities (CUP, 2017), which won the Certificate of Merit in a Specialized Area of International Law from the American Society of International Law in 2019. She was awarded the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Academy of Environmental Law Junior Scholar Prize and the University of Melbourne Woodward Medal in Humanities and Social Sciences for her work Trading Fish, Saving Fish: The Interaction between Regimes in International Law (CUP, 2011). She was part of the legal term assisting IUCN in its written submissions before the International Court of Justice in the historic advisory opinion on the obligations of states in respect of climate change.

Elected in 2021 as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, Margaret is co-chair of the ‘Oceans and International Environmental Law Interest Group’ of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. She is academic consultant to the World Bank’s Blue Economy Program and from 2019-2020 served as Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). In 2016, she was the Director of Studies for public international law at the Hague Academy of International Law. Margaret began her academic career at the University of Cambridge, where she was Research Fellow in Public International Law at Pembroke College and the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law.

Margaret is a former associate to the Chief Justice of the Federal Court of Australia and has practised as a solicitor at a major Australian national law firm. She holds a PhD and an LLM (First class) from the University of Cambridge and a BA/LLB (Hons) from the University of Melbourne. She has been Distinguished International Visiting Professor at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland (2022), and Visiting Professor at Aix-Marseille University (2022) and the State University of Saint Petersburg (2017).

Margaret supervises doctoral students in the areas of climate change (including climate displacement, coastal adaptation, climate finance and comparative coal regulation); international economic law (including renewable energy policies and the trading of carbon credits); the law of the sea (including marine plastic pollution and the impacts of decolonisation); and public international law (including Conferences of the Parties, the duty to cooperate and international dispute settlement). She is unavailable to supervise further research students at the present time.

Other School and University Responsibilities

Law School Research Committee

Coordinator, MLS Judge in Residence program

Memberships and Affiliations

Assistant Editor, British Year Book of International Law

Society of International Economic Law

American Society of International Law

Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (ANZSIL)