Anthony Pagden is the Distinguished Professor of Political Science and History at UCLA, and has in the past been affiliated with Oxford, Cambridge, the EUI (Florence), and Johns Hopkins University.  Easily one of the most important intellectual historians alive, Anthony Pagden has written extensively on European, and in particular Spanish history, with a special focus on the relationship between the peoples of Europe and its overseas settlements and those of the non-European world from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In this episode, Anthony joins us to discuss his latest book, The Pursuit of Europe: A History (OUP 2022), which traces the history of the idea of European Unification, starting from the end of the Napoleonic Wars right through to Brexit. The book details the various attempts to deal with the question of how to create a united Europe after centuries of internecine conflict, while at the same time preserving the political, legal, and cultural integrity of the individual nations, many of which had had extensive imperial holdings until the end of the WWII. The resulting entity, Anthony argues in the book, is to be regarded neither as a ‘super-state’ nor an empire, but a new post-national order united in a political life based, not upon the old shibboleths of nationalism and patriotism, but upon a body of common values and aspirations. 

Antoine is a Senior Researcher at the TMC Asser Instituut, where he coordinates the research strand on 'Advancing Public Interests in International and European Law'. He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute in 2015 after defending a thesis on the interaction between the lex sportiva (the private regulations governing international sports) and EU Law. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the ASSER International Sports Law Blog, founder and editor of the Yearbook of International Sports Arbitration, and a member of the editorial board of the International Sports Law Journal and International Sports Law book Series of Asser Press. His research focuses on the role of private actors in transnational law, using the lex sportiva as his main case study.

Signe Rehling Larsen is the author of The Constitutional Theory of the Federation and the European Union  (OUP 2021), as well as European Public Law after Empires, European Law Open (2022). In these strikingly original works, she argues, contrary to settled assumptions, that the European Union is neither a unique nor an unprecedented political structure, but one that has a venerable ideal in the form of the 'federation', as well as an uncomfortable relationship with the imperial heritage of its Member States. Signe is currently an Examination Fellow in Law at Magdalen College, Oxford University. She obtained her doctorate in 2018 from the London School of Economics, after which she held a Max Weber postdoctoral fellowship at the European University Institute. She has also spent time at the New School for Social Research in New York, Bard College Berlin, and the University of Copenhagen. 

Janne Nijman and Helmut Aust join us to talk about their recently published Research Handbook on International Law and Cities (Edward Elgar 2021), co-edited with the assistance of Miha Marchenko. The book, which was awarded the ESIL (European Society of International Law) Collaborative Book Prize in 2022, is the result of a long process of collaboration and numerous conferences, involving several experts in the field of international law and cities.  Leading the podcast today is Carlo Colombo, Assistant Professor of Administrative Law and Governance at the Faculty of Law, Maastricht University. Carlo is a contributor to the Research Handbook mentioned above. Also appearing on the podcast is the regular host, Aravind Ganesh.Janne Nijman is Professor of History and Theory of International Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Amsterdam and Professor of International Law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Helmut Aust is Professor of Law at Free University Berlin where he teaches public and international law. 

Evan Fox-Decent is Full Professor at the Faculty of Law at McGill University in Montreal, where he has held a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Cosmopolitan Law and Justice since October 2019. He is the author of several books such as Sovereignty’s Promise: The State as Fiduciary (OUP 2012) and - together with his regular co-author Evan Criddle (William & Mary Law School) - Fiduciaries of Humanity: How International Law Constitutes Authority (OUP 2016). As these titles indicate, Evan’s research interests span both private and public law, and his project may be described as one of trying to explicate the concept of sovereignty in public law by analogy to the ideas of fiduciary rights and obligations in private law.In this episode, Evan talks to us about his recent article, Mandatory Multilateralism (American Journal of International Law, 2019), again co-authored with Evan Criddle. The article is the basis of a forthcoming book, tentatively entitled Governing a Divided World: Mandatory Cooperation under International Law.

Our guest for today is Katharina Pistor, the Edwin B Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School, where she also heads the Center on Global Legal Transformation. Besides these appointments, Katharina is a research associate with the Centre for Economic Policy Research, has served as principal investigator of the Global Finance and Law Initiative (2011–2013), and as a board member (2011–2014) and fellow (2019) of the European Corporate Governance Institute. Together with Martin Hellwig she was awarded the 2012 Max Planck Research Award on International Financial Regulation, and in 2015 she was elected a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. A renowned expert in comparative law, company law, bankruptcy, law and finance, as well as the regulation of cryptocurrencies, she is the author of several groundbreaking articles such as ‘A Legal Theory of Finance’ in the Journal of Comparative Economics (2013), and ‘From Territorial to Monetary Sovereignty’ in Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2017). Our discussion for this episode, however, is about her 2019 bestseller The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton UP).Joining me on the interview is André Nuñes Chaïb, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Law, Maastricht University. The podcast was edited by Renaud Callaert.

Our guest for this episode is Guy Fiti Sinclair, one of the world's foremost experts in the areas of international organizations law, the history of international law, and law and social theory, as well as the author of To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States (OUP 2017).In the book, Guy provides a detailed history of crucial periods of development for three major international organisations - the International Labor Organization from the 1920s until the end of World War II, the emergence of United Nations peacekeeping in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the World Bank's 'turn to governance' in the 1990s - to demonstrate how the lawyers working for them drew upon ideas from domestic constitutional law and corporate management to expand those organisations' powers over time without formally amending their founding treaties. Moreover, Guy argues that this expansion was undertaken and rationalized as necessary to a process of making modern states on a broadly Western model; and that international law has played a central role in that process. In addition to an appointment as Associate Professor at the University of Auckland, Guy is or has been a Senior Fellow on the Melbourne Law Masters at Melbourne Law School, an External Scientific Fellow of the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law, Associate Director of the New Zealand Centre for Public Law and the Associate Editor of the European Journal of International Law. Leading the interview was André Nuñes Chaïb, Assistant Professor of Globalization and Law at Maastricht University, with the help of Aravind Ganesh, Postdoctoral Researcher in International and Comparative Law. The podcast was edited by Renaud Callaert, a student on the LLB programme at Maastricht University Faculty of Law. 

Our guest for this episode is Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton UP, 2019). The book relates the little-known histories of Anglophone African and Black Caribbean postcolonial movements. Her core claim in the book is that the goal of these African and Caribbean anti-colonial movements was not to recreate their societies in the image of their colonial oppressors' - or, in academic legalese, to 'universalise Westphalian sovereignty'. Instead of ‘nation-building’, their project was one of ‘world-making’ organised around the principle of 'non-domination': they sought not just to bring freedom and self-determination for the peoples of Africa and the Caribbean, but also to create regional and international institutions that would protect and preserve that freedom. To this end, Adom charts the rise and fall of these movements, their attempts to set up regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean to extricate themselves from dependence upon Western markets, and – when those attempts failed – to create a New International Economic Order (NIEO) enveloping the entire world.The book has garnered a truly vast number of awards: the Frantz Fanon Prize of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, the Best Book Prize of the African Studies Association, the First Book Award by the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association, the Best Book by the Theory Section of the International Studies Association, to name just a few. Adom is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. Besides this, she is a board member of the Pozen Center for Human Rights, a fellow at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. Professor Getachew obtained a joint PhD in Political Science and African-American Studies from Yale University. Joining me as an interviewer is André Nunes Chaïb, an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, Maastricht University.

What 'values' do international law and international humanitarian law attempt to manifest? When do states acquire duties with respect to human rights towards people outside their borders? How 'binding' are these duties?Our guest for this episode is Lea Raible, who spoke to us about her recent book Human Rights Unbound: A Theory of Extraterritoriality, published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Lea currently works as a Lecturer in Public Law at the University of Glasgow, but before this she held academic positions in Edinburgh, University College London, and here at Maastricht University. Lea was also a 2021 fellow on the Re:Constitution project organised by the Forum Transnationale Studien and Stiftung Mercator.  A graduate of the universities of Zürich, Hong Kong, and University College London, her research interests are in international and constitutional law, and their relation to political philosophy in particular. Her scholarship covers questions of the extraterritorial application of human rights, human rights adjudication and participatory democracy, and the theory and practice of referendums.

Suppose someone assaults you. You defend yourself. Your aggressor is not allowed to use further force to 'defend' herself against your acts of self-defence. Only victims get to defend themselves; aggressors do not.However, under the contemporary law of war - euphemistically called 'international humanitarian law' by international lawyers - aggressors appear to be permitted to carry on using force in exactly the same way as defenders, once the both of them are in a war. How does this make any sense?Also, why is it that a non-uniformed scientist on the cusp of building a nuclear weapon may not legally be the subject of military attack, while a flat-footed lance corporal playing the triangles in the military band is fair game?In this interview, Arthur Ripstein offers an astonishingly clear and perspicacious explanation for why these and other of our seemingly incoherent rules about how war should be waged, even if, as we also intuitively recognize, war is barbaric and should never be waged at all.Arthur Ripstein is the Howard L Beck QC Professor of Law, as well as University Professor at the University of Toronto, teaching in both the philosophy and law faculties. Widely considered 'the most influential contemporary interpreter and exponent of' Kant's political and legal philosophy, Arthur recently published Kant and the Law of War (OUP 2021), which reconceptualize the legal and political duties of states and the norms governing war.The book is accompanied by two companion volumes, The Public Uses of Coercion and Force: From Constitutionalism to War (OUP 2021), edited by Ester Herlin Karnell and Enzo Rossi, and Rules for Wrongdoers: Law, Morality, War (OUP 2021), edited by Saira Mohamed. The interview was conducted by Aravind Ganesh in January 2021.