Dr Martin Clark

Overview

Martin is a senior lecturer in law at Melbourne Law School and an editor at the London Review of International Law. He works in the history, theory and political economy of international and public law.

Prior to joining MLS, Martin taught and coordinated units in contract law, legal theory and legal research at La Trobe Law School and UTas Law and was a Modern Law Review Postdoctoral fellow. Among other union roles, Martin was President of the La Trobe University Branch, National Tertiary Education Union from July to December 2024, and is an NTEU Delegate at MLS.

Martin’s current research projects include a history of ‘climate’ in legal thought, early work on which was supported by a La Trobe University ABC Grant. Outputs from this project include ‘“Nature is of God”: Land, Money, Empire and Extraction in James Harrington’s Legal Thought, 1656–60’ (2025) 28 Law Text Culture, currently in press for a special issue on law and extractivism. His first monograph Juridical Monsters: The International and Domestic in Imperial Legal Thought is under contract with Oxford University Press, and a co-authored book Eating the World: A Global History of Law and Commodities with Yoriko Otomo is in final stages of preparation for Counterpress. His recent publications include ‘“The Fragile Power of Political Nations”: Adam Smith’s Federative’ (2025) 22 Modern Intellectual History (with Thomas Poole) in press, and ‘Lorimer, Herzl, Kanafani’ in Tor Krever et al, ‘On International Law and Gaza: Critical Reflections’ (2024) 12 London Review of International Law 217, 287. Other recent work has appeared in the UNSW Law Journal, the Modern Law Review, the British Yearbook of International Law and the Leiden Journal of International Law. Martin was assistant editor with Anne Orford and Florian Hoffmann on the Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (2016).

Martin holds a PhD from LSE Law, where he was a Dame Rosalyn Higgins Scholar and Modern Law Review Scholar, and an MPhil, LLB(Hons) and BA(Hons) from the University of Melbourne.