Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

The speaker for the Eli Lauterpacht Lecture 2025 was Santiago Villalpando, Legal Advisor and Director of UNESCO.Lecture summary: Is international law facing a decline of treaties?In recent years, several authoritative voices have pointed out certain developments which seem to indicate that States are shifting away from treaty law-making for the governance of their international relations.Taking as a starting point the sociological concept of “liquid modernity” introduced by Zygmunt Bauman, this lecture will explore how treaties, archetypes of solid and stable law-making, have reacted to an unstable global community where norms seem to be eroding and long-term commitments appear to be challenged.As the lecture will show, there is no doubt that the law and practice of treaties have evolved to adapt to a shifting international environment, but the news about the death of treaties is greatly exaggerated. The Eli Lauterpacht Lecture was established after Sir Eli's death in 2017 to celebrate his life and work. This lecture takes place on a Friday at the Centre at the start of the Michaelmas Term in any academic year.These lectures are kindly supported by Dr and Mrs Ivan Berkowitz who are Principal Benefactors of the Centre.

On Friday 28 November 2025, The Professor Trevor Allan FBA delivered the 202 Sir David Williams Lecture entitled "Neither Parliamentary Sovereignty nor Judicial Supremacy: The Rule of Law as the Rule of Common Right and Reason".The lecture begins at: 07:27The Sir David Williams Lecture is an annual address delivered by a guest lecturer in honour of Sir David Williams, Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of English Law and Emeritus Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University.More information about this lecture, including photographs from the event, is available from the Centre for Public Law website at:https://www.cpl.law.cam.ac.uk/sir-david-williams-lectures

Speaker: Professor Daniele Gallo, Luiss University, ItalyAbstract: The seminar, building upon Professor Gallo’s book, Direct Effect in EU Law (EU Law Library Series, OUP, 2025), will explore the uneasy trajectories of a transformative doctrine such as direct effect. By reassessing both the present and future of this legal and political construct, it will argue that such chameleon-like principle has evolved into a broader legal category than it was at the outset of the European integration process and that this development has been only partially captured by the CJEU. In doing so, Professor Gallo will revisit the no horizontal direct effect rule of contemporary directives and argue for its overcoming in light of the text, scope, and objectives of legal acts that are substantially different from those envisaged by Article 288 TFEU.For more information see:https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

Is modern left-wing progressive politics to blame for the current rise of the far-right?This event was held by the Cambridge University Human Rights Law Society (CUHRLS) and Clare Politics Society, who hosted renowned human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, best known for his decades-long work with LGBTQ+ and other global social justice movements which has shaped contemporary activism. Peter discussed the rising tide of the far right and why progressive politics has struggled to stem this tide and safeguard human rights in response.Peter Tatchell is one of the UK’s best-known human rights campaigners, with more than fifty years of work across LGBTQ+ rights, anti-racism, democracy, and social justice. Throughout his career he has taken on governments and institutions around the world, often using bold direct action to highlight abuses and push for reform: he helped found ‘OutRage!' in the 1990s and most recently leads the Peter Tatchell Foundation.For more on Clare Politics Society see their Instgram page. For CUHRLS see their Instagram page.

On 25 November 2025 Dr Susanne Brand delivered the CELH annual lecture on the topic 'Outlawry and its Consequences in Later Medieval English Law and Practice'.The Centre for English Legal History (CELH) was formally established in 2016 to provide a hub for researchers working in legal history across the University of Cambridge. The Centre holds regular seminars during academic terms, and an annual centrepiece lecture.To find out more, and download the accompanying presentation, please refer to:http://www.celh.law.cam.ac.uk/lectures

Speaker: Professor Catherine Malecki (University of Rennes)Even in the context of the future EU Omnibus Package and the EU Directive n°2025/794 of 14 April 2025 'Stop-the-Clock', Companies and there directors must face an increasing climate litigation and this change cannot go back 20 years of progress in Sustainable Corporate Governance which is on the way on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and in Asia. Indeed, the European Commission has been releasing innovative and often complex regulations at a breakneck speed since 2018 (CSRD, CS3D, Taxonomy, to name a few) and it would be inconceivable to come back to 2001 at the time of the first European Recommendation on CSR and to ignore the EU Green Deal of 2019.Directors have to take into account negatives externalities and stringent obligations such as the Transition Plans. Even if the the next generation of sustainable board directors is well aware of Climate risks, several questions may arise : is there a need to reshape the board despite the EU Directive WoB Women in board of 23 November 2022? What about the pressure of the Stakeholders and the pressure of the Sustainable Strategy ? In France, in the wake of the Due Diligence Law of 27 March 2017, climate litigation is also increasing (for example TotalEnergies, CA Paris, 18 June 2024) and France was the first State Member for having implemented the CSRD in December 2023. Didn't all this happen too quickly ? Can we stop European time when tackling Climate change is rather a race against time? La Fontaine famous fable " the Hare and the Tortoise" is full of wisdom.Biography: Catherine Malecki is Professor of Private Law Rennes 2 University France and Member of the IUF (Institut universitaire de France) Fundamental Chair.For more information see the Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law website:http://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/

Speaker: Professor Lilian Edwards, Emeritus Professor of Law, Innovation & Society, Newcastle Law School Biography: Lilian Edwards is a leading academic in the field of Internet law. She has taught information technology law, e-commerce law, privacy law and Internet law at undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1996 and been involved with law and artificial intelligence (AI) since 1985. She is now Emerita Professor at Newcastle and Honorary Professor at CREAte, University of Glasgow, which she helped co-found. She is the editor and major author of Law, Policy and the Internet, one of the leading textbooks in the field of Internet law (Hart, 2018, new edition forthcoming with Urquhart and Goanta, 2026). She won the Future of Privacy Forum award in 2019 for best paper ("Slave to the Algorithm" with Michael Veale) and the award for best non-technical paper at FAccT in 2020, on automated hiring. In 2004 she won the Barbara Wellberry Memorial Prize in 2004 for work on online privacy where she invented the notion of data trusts, a concept which ten years later has been proposed in EU legislation. She is a former fellow of the Alan Turing Institute on Law and AI, and the Institute for the Future of Work. Edwards has consulted for inter alia the EU Commission, the OECD, and WIPO.Abstract: The right to an explanation is having another moment. Well after the heyday of 2016-2018 when scholars tussled over whether the GDPR ( in either art 22 or arts 13-15) conferred a right to explanation, the CJEU case of Dun and Bradstreet has finally confirmed its existence, and the Platform Work Directive has wholesale revamped art 22 in its Algorithmic Management chapter. Most recently the EU AI Act added its own Frankenstein-like right to an explanation (art 86) of AI systems .None of these provisions however pin down what the essence of the explanation should be, given many notions can be invoked here ; a faithful description of source code or training data; an account that enables challenge or contestation; a “plausible” description that may be appealing in a behaviouralist sense but might be actually misleading when operationalised eg to generate a medical course of treatment. Agarwal et al argue that the tendency of UI designers, and regulators and judges alike to lean towards the plausibility end, may be unsuited to large language models which represent far more of a black box in size and optimisation than conventional machine learning, and which are trained to present encouraging but not always accurate accounts of their workings. Yet this is also the direction of travel taken by CJEU Dun & Bradstreet , above. This paper argues that explanations of large model outputs may present novel challenges needing thoughtful legal mandates.For more information (and to download slides) see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

On Wednesday 12 November 2025 Professor Dame Sarah Worthington DBE, KC (Hon), FBA, FRSA delivered the second of three 2025 Hamlyn Lectures at the Faculty.The Hamlyn Lectures are normally delivered in the autumn and the annual Hamlyn Seminar, which marks the publication of the lecture, is usually held in London in the following spring.The lecture was on the title: 'The Paradoxes of Property: What do we Own and What can we Own?'For more about the Hamlyn Lectures see: https://law.exeter.ac.uk/about/thehamlyntrust/lectures/

Speaker: Dr Raphaële Xenidis, Sciences Po Law School, FranceAbstract: EU anti-discrimination law has been a subject of choice for critiques from various disciplines. One influential motif that has durably structured the critical analysis of EU anti-discrimination law is the distinction between formal and substantive equality. Substantive approaches seek to diagnose and remedy the disjunctions between formal equality frameworks and social realities. Yet, such critiques often remain implicit in their engagement with social theory, leaving the very notion and construction of ’social realities’ largely unexamined. This paper thus asks: How does the principle of non-discrimination mediate and produce specific forms of individual subjectivity, interpersonal relationships, institutional arrangements, material and spatial organisation and ultimately social order? How does it authorise the existence of certain subjects and groups while excluding and rendering others invisible? What 'forms of life' does EU anti-discrimination and its jurisprudential construction by the Court enable or preclude?For more information see:https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

Speaker: Professor Ernest Lim (National University of Singapore)This presentation explores the external dimension of directors’ duties—whether directors can and should address climate impacts and other externalities even absent financial benefits to the company’s shareholders—in contrast to the shareholder value maximisation focus. Its significance stems from universal investors, the EU due diligence regime, and high emitting SOEs. I examine three arguments: UK nature clauses are constrained by shareholder primacy; US shareholder preference claims are undermined by financially driven activism; and SOE directors’ duties can align with state ownership (as shown in China).3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners.For more information see the Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law website:http://www.3cl.law.cam.ac.uk/