Professor Margaret A Young

ARC Future Fellow

Phone number +61 3 8344 1097 Email m.young@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert Find an Expert

LocationRoom 0828

Overview

Professor Margaret A Young is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow who specialises in public international law, the law of the sea, international trade law, climate change and environmental law. She is currently finalising an Australian Research Council-funded project with Professor Hilary Charlesworth on ‘The Potential and Limits of International Adjudication’. Her last book,  The Impact of Climate Change Mitigation on Indigenous and Forest Communities (CUP, 2017) 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).

Elected in 2021 as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, Margaret is academic consultant to the World Bank’s Blue Economy Program and serves as a member of the international expert group for the proposed United Nations ‘Global Pact for the Environment’. Margaret served as Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) from 2019-2020. 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, Visiting Professor at Aix-Marseille University, and at the State University of Saint Petersburg and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School.

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)

Research Centres