Anne Orford

Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellow and Program Director

Anne Orford is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law, and an Australian Laureate Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where she directs the Laureate Program in International Law. She is an elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a past President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. Her work has been recognised by the award of the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellowship by the Australian Research Council (2015-20), a Future Fellowship awarded by the Australian Research Council (2012-15), an Australian Professorial Fellowship awarded by the Australian Research Council (2007-2011), the Woodward Medal for Excellence in Humanities and Social Sciences awarded by the University of Melbourne (2013), and honorary doctorates of laws awarded by Lund University (2012), the University of Gothenburg (2012), and the University of Helsinki (2017). She will be a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 2019, and has held numerous other visiting positions, including as Raoul Wallenberg Visiting Chair at Lund University, Hedda Andersson Visiting Research Chair in History at Lund University, Visiting Professor at University Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Torgny Segerstedt Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg, and Senior Emile Noël Research Fellow at New York University. She will deliver a course at the Hague Academy of International Law in 2021.

Her scholarship combines study of the history and theory of international law, analysis of developments in international legal doctrines and practice, and an engagement with central debates and concepts in related fields, in order to grasp the changing nature and role of international law in contemporary politics. Her publications include International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press 2011), Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law (Cambridge University Press 2003), the edited collection International Law and its Others (Cambridge University Press 2006), and, as co-editor, The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford University Press 2016). A collection of her essays in French translation, with an introduction by Martti Koskenniemi, will be published by Pedone in 2018. Her latest book, International Law and the Politics of History, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

She will present a keynote address at the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law Conference to be held at the Victoria University of Wellington in July 2018 and a keynote address at the Biennial Conference of the Latin American Society of International Law to be held at Torcuato De Tella University, Buenos Aires in September 2018. Her recent talks include the Centre for Critical International Law (CeCIL) Annual Lecture on Surplus Population and the History of International Law (Kent, 2017), a public lecture on Civil War, Intervention, and International Law at the Higher School for Economics (Moscow, 2017), a keynote lecture on Critical Thinking and Human Rights at the launch of the Lund Human Rights Research Hub (Lund, 2016), the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context Annual Lecture on Mare Nostrum: International Law, Spatial Order, and the Mediterranean (Queen Mary, 2016); the Erik Castrén Lecture on International Law discussing civil war and intervention (Helsinki, 2015); the Katherine Baker Memorial Lecture on Food Security, the WTO, and the Social State (Toronto, 2014); the James Crawford Oration on International Law addressing humanitarian intervention and Syria (Adelaide, 2013), and an ESIL Lecture on Histories of International Law and Empire (Sorbonne, 2013). She has delivered keynote and plenary addresses at annual conferences of the American 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, and the Korean Society of International Law, and presented her research by invitation to numerous governments, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations.

She is a founding co-convenor of the Annual Junior Faculty Forum for International Law, a collaboration between Melbourne, Nottingham, and New York Universities, which intensively workshops the research of selected junior international law faculty from around the world, and was the founding Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at Melbourne Law School. She has conducted master classes for doctoral and early career researchers at universities in Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Russia, Sweden, and the UK, and presented keynote addresses at national doctoral student conferences in Canada and Sweden