ESIL NEWSLETTER

SUMMER 2026

Dear members,

 

ESIL organises many activities throughout the year, but the annual conference is the highlight in our Society’s calendar. After meetings in Vilnius (2024) and Berlin (2025), we are moving to the southwestern tip of Europe this year, as if driven by a powerful northeasterly breeze, that “favourite among winds”, which (according to Friedrich Hölderlin) “promises fiery spirit and a good voyage to mariners”: From 3-5 September 2026, we meet in Málaga, whose University will host ESIL’s 21st annual conference, organised by the local team led by Ana Salinas de Frías.

The theme of this year’s conference - ‘International Law and Conflict’ - suggests that, unlike in Hölderlin’s poem promising ‘cradling breezes’ and ‘golden dreams’, we may be in for a rocky ride. The theme will resonate with many. Most obviously, it speaks to a deeply held concern, put succinctly in the opening line of the programme brochure: “The international legal order is facing a systemic crisis.” Following ESIL’s established format, we will engage with aspects of this crisis through interest group workshops, fora and agorae. We will have many opportunities to identify factors driving the crisis and to share anxieties and frustration. Yet looking at the programme, it seems to me that our annual conference will not just be an exercise in soul-searching about what is currently going wrong in international law. Panels and IG workshops will also consider potential contributions of international courts to the quest for peace and justice, engage with legacies of prior attempts at overcoming conflict, and reflect on “the responsibility of international law scholars in times of fatigue”. Few of us will come to Málaga expecting a celebration of international law’s strengths. But I hope we can do more than just agonise, if only because (as the conference brochure also puts it) “conflict is a general, horizontal and cross-cutting concept that has existed at the core of international law since its inception”.

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In addition to substantive debate (and meetings in the University’s corridors and Málaga’s bars), this year’s annual conference will be important for ESIL’s governance. 2026 is an election year for our Society, as we will select up to seven ESIL members to serve on the Board for a four-year term. (Information about the process and the candidates’ profiles and ideas is available here; make sure to have a look before voting starts.) I am grateful to the twelve ESIL members who have decided to stand for election. While elections are about making choices, and not every bid election will be successful, I am keen on working with all twelve of them, whether on the Board or in other settings. 

This in particular as the next 1-2 years promise to be busy for our Society. Busy, because alongside our established activities, the Board in the past months has decided to launch a range of new ESIL initiatives that we will need to put into practice. These include:

- ESIL Conversations and Rapid Response Roundtables, online formats started in 2026,

- a Junior Faculty Forum focused on the work of early-career scholars, which we’re pioneering in October 2026 in collaboration with the Latin American Society of International Law and, most recently,

- an annual ESIL Lecture, which from 2027 is meant to give leading international legal scholars and practitioners an opportunity to present their overarching vision of international law (and about which further details will be shared soon).

And the next years will be busy, too, because beyond day-to-day activities, we will need to engage with a range of ‘structural questions’. Let me flag three of them that I expect to shape debates of the coming months and years:

ESIL and legal practice: For years, many ESIL members (including many candidates standing for election to the Board) have encouraged ESIL to open up beyond our core academic circles. In my view, we stand to benefit significantly from collaborating more systematically with legal practitioners. But we need to move from words to action.

How ESIL works: In July 2026, ESIL welcomed a second member to the Secretariat, Elisa Cau: Elisa has taken up work alongside Walter Ilardi, in line with the MOU that regulates ESIL’s relationship with the MOU. Her arrival allows us to pursue a more ambitious agenda for the remaining duration of the MOU with the EUI, for which renegotiations will start next year. It also provides the Society with an opportunity to reflect on its operation and goals going forward.

ESIL’s audiences: The Articles of Association task ESIL to “promot[e] a greater awareness and understanding of international law not only amongst lawyers but within the general public”. While many individual ESIL members engage in discussions with ‘the general public’, ESIL’s focus so far has been on discussions ‘amongst [international] lawyers’. If we are concerned about international law’s “systemic crisis” (as the Málaga programme states), then we may need to rethink this - and discuss how we might meaningfully address ‘the general public’ as a Society.

***

These are big structural questions, with which, as a Society, we should engage in the coming years. Such engagement will require continued initiative by the Board. It will benefit especially from input and ideas of committed ESIL members. And Hölderlin’s “fiery spirit” (the one coming with northeasterly winds) may be useful, too, as we seek to keep ESIL vibrant and dynamic and work to increase its role in debates about international law. 

I wish you all a great rentrée after the summer break, and look forward to meeting many of you in Málaga very soon.

Christian J. Tams

Farewell, Fellow Travellers

In Manchester in 2018, I stood for election to the ESIL Board as one of the Conveners of the Interest Group on Legal Theory & Philosophy. I had lost my voice the night before at one of the ESIL rock concerts, where colleagues with far more talent than I regaled us with hair metal and Britpop classics. ‘Lend me your voice!’ I inadvertently croaked, eliciting laughs and smiles. I had meant to say ‘lend me your vote,’ yet somehow the Freudian slip was probably more effective: this expatriate Canadian was warmly welcomed onto the Board. For international lawyers, our discipline often serves as a homeland built not of geography, but of shared inquiry, and Manchester was where this wanderer truly found his tribe.

I felt much excitement that I was joining something larger than myself, stepping up to work within the professional community of international lawyers based in Europe. I had no inkling then that, over the next eight years, a significant part of my professional and intellectual  identity would become interwoven with the Society and the intense period of growth and change we have witnessed. I did not know I would forge such intense professional and intellectual friendships, gain mentors and mentees, or serve as Secretary-General and President of the Society. Nor had I realised the weight and responsibility that came with joining the Board. Though not without a tinge of sadness at moving on, I depart with pride in what we have achieved together, and also with some anticipation of extra time for new projects.

Academia can be an intensely solitary and sometimes precarious career path. In the quiet solitude of our studies, we reason from principles and ideals, yet our professional development relies deeply on the relationships we build with our students, colleagues, and peers. Legal scholarship is, at its heart, a profoundly human conversation.

I hope that for our members, our Society offers the connections, networks, and groupings that allow each of us to find fellow travellers, whatever our scholarly commitments. Community and a sense of belonging matter for all of us. So I depart confident that, however much room for innovation remains, ESIL is deeply committed to building an open, transnational, and pluralistic Society that reaches out to all. ESIL has proven that it can curate, host, and drive the cutting edge of international legal scholarship, and I am honoured to have played a small part in its trajectory. Upon being re-elected UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld wrote: “For all that has been – thanks. To all that shall be – Yes.” It is in that exact spirit of gratitude and hope for the future, not only for ESIL, that I step away from the Board.

The Society is in excellent hands: our Board is deeply committed and collegial, with great projects in store; and I cannot thank our Secretariat enough for their unyielding patience and devotion. As I step back, I carry with me not just memories of spirited debates (and some long meetings), but an enduring faith in the future of our collective endeavours. I shall cheer you all on from the sidelines. Our Interest Groups are vibrant, our global networks are continually expanding, and the ESIL community is growing and diversifying. In 2024, we celebrated our 20th anniversary—here’s to an equally exciting next decade.

International Law in an Age of Post-Truth

Brief reflections of a departing Vice-President on feeling, proof, and why our scholars and practitioners belong in the same room.

A story is told of Justice Louis Brandeis that, asked in retirement what it was like to be a constitutional judge once off the bench, he answered: it is when you open your window in the morning and see that everything out there is unconstitutional. I have thought of that line twice — in 2022, as I left the European Court of Human Rights, and again this year, as my leave-taking from this Bureau neared, after eight years, three of them as Vice-President. The international lawyer who retires today is tempted to say something similar, and darker: she opens her window onto a world in which almost everything now seems to contradict international law — borders redrawn by force, civilians made targets, children spoils, the last century's most solemn undertakings honoured, when they are honoured at all, in the breach. Unlike Brandeis's, our version is not quite a joke. She would, for the most part, be simply right.

I came to this Bureau as a practitioner among scholars — a judge in a house of theoreticians — meaning to narrow the distance between those who develop the doctrine and those who must practise it. I thought I understood why it mattered; I did not yet understand how much. Then, mid-term, the argument stopped being academic: my own country became the victim of a barbaric violation of the norms our discipline exists to defend. From that day I felt international law as a wound, and as a stubborn hope. I had long known, from an international bench, what it is to decide a human being's fate under the weight of feeling. Now I saw, even more sharply, how easily a practised hand is swept.

We like to imagine the practitioner — the judge above all — as an instrument of pure reason, feelings left at the door with her coat. Terry Maroney calls this the cultural script of judicial dispassion; it is a fiction, and everyone who has done the work knows it. Behind every robe there is a person who feels. The question is never whether emotion enters judgment — it always does — but what we do with it. Emotion, as Martha Nussbaum insists, is itself a form of judgment: how we first register that a wrong has been done.

This conviction gave me my purpose here: I spent these years trying to draw our scholars and our practitioners into one room — and, no less, to make the voice of Central and Eastern Europe, which learned the price of rights the hard way, carry further in a Society long centred to its west. For the practitioner stands in the flood — the judge alone with the file, the advocate with her client's terror — and doctrine, the patient and thankless work of scholars, is the ballast that keeps her upright: not by numbing her heart, but by giving feeling weight and direction, so that a grieving, indignant human being can feel all of it and still decide soundly.

And this has never mattered more than now. Emotion perceives, but it does not prove; left to itself, it is where justice dies — the crowd, too, is certain of what it feels. In an age of post-truth, feeling is no longer merely felt but manufactured and aimed, and a discipline that lets emotion outrun proof can be steered, deliberately, astray. Nowhere is the risk sharper than around our gravest words, cried out before any tribunal has weighed them. Consider the heaviest word we have — genocide — which Raphael Lemkin forged to be exact enough to bind a court, not merely to move a heart; the Convention of 1948 gave it an almost cruel precision, so that it might carry a finding's weight and not dissolve into rhetoric. Hurled as a slogan, such a word does not sharpen justice but blunts it: a threshold worn smooth by use will not hold when the next victim needs it. To keep the distance between the cry and the finding is not to doubt the suffering — it is to keep the edge that must one day cut in the victim's name. The good judge is not one who feels nothing, but one who submits the feeling to the discipline of proof: feeling supplies the energy of justice, doctrine supplies its keel.

What did we manage, and what is left? The Society has opened its doors wider to those who practise beyond the academy, and the voice of our east is a little less faint than it was — modest gains, but the measure lives only through such things. The rest remains: to keep building the doctrine, rigorous and slow, not because we are cold, but because those who must one day decide, under a pressure few can imagine, deserve something solid to hold. The prophet Isaiah did not say the work of justice is passion; he famously said the work of justice shall be peace — and peace is what feeling becomes when it is carried, patiently and honestly, all the way through the law.

I am leaving the Bureau, not the work.To those who follow I hand the bridge — scholars to keep the practitioners honest, practitioners to keep the scholars human. You will find me on it.

ESIL BOARD ELECTIONS 2026

ESIL BOARD ELECTIONS 2026

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ESIL TEACHING CORNER AND TEACHING CORNER WEBINARS

 

ESIL TEACHING CORNER AND TEACHING CORNER WEBINARS

 

In today’s era of permacrisis, the ESIL Teaching Corner and the ESIL Teaching Corner Webinar Series seek to fill a critical gap: while much attention is given to what should be taught, very little focuses on how to teach international law effectively. These webinars will explore innovative teaching models—such as moot courts, legal clinics, and even creative approaches like films and theatre—while fostering academic dialogue on pedagogy.
Credentials to access the ESIL Teaching Corner are distributed to all current ESIL members via the ESIL Monthly Updates.

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ESIL LECTURES

ESIL BOOK SERIES

The ESIL Book Series publishes high-quality volumes on various international law themes. The good news is that the ESIL Board has broadened the scope of the ESIL Book Series beyond the themes of ESIL Annual Conferences and ESIL Joint Events.

Proposals based on IG events, other ESIL events, and ESIL members' proposals within the scope of the Book Series are welcome. Potential editors are welcome to contact the General Editor to help shape the future of ESIL scholarly publications.

ESIL PROCEEDINGS

The ESIL Proceedings feature papers presented at ESIL events (Annual Conferences, Research Fora, and Interest Group events).

Publication in the ESIL Proceedings enables authors to disseminate their work widely and reach broader audiences without the usual delays associated with more traditional means of publication. Publication in the ESIL Proceedings does not prevent the subsequent publication of papers in academic journals or edited collections.

ESIL Proceedings are included in the EUI CADMUS Research Repository, and all the papers presented at previous events until 2024 are available here.

For further information, please do not hesitate to write to esil.papers@gmail.com.

ESIL REFLECTIONS

The ESIL Reflections offer up-to-date reflections on current issues in international law in the form of short papers that at argue one particular point that may trigger further debate in the scientific community.

The Reflections cover a wide range of topics relating to current developments in international law and practice as well as theoretical reflections in a way that is relatively accessible to non-experts. The aim is to foster discussion between ESIL members and international law scholars and practitioners more generally – in Europe, but also beyond. ESIL.

ESIL Members who have an interest in contributing are encouraged to visit the dedicated webpage for further information.

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