International Law

KATHRYN: Hi everyone. My name is Kathryn Greenman I'm an academic at UTS, the University of Technology Sydney, in the Faculty of Law. And I'm here with my colleague, Associate Professor Jessie Hohmann.

JESSIE: Hi!

KATHRYN: Jessie and I were recently lucky enough to take part in the feminist international law judgments project, which produced this wonderful book [Jessie holds up the book!] which was recently awarded the American Society of International Law 2020 Certificate of Merit for preeminent contribution to creative scholarship. We're delighted to be joined today by the book's editors and the coordinators of the project, Troy Lavers and Loveday Hodson. Troy and Loveday are both associate professors at the University of Leicester. Troy's research interests are in international public law, international criminal law, the crime of aggression, and feminism and international law. She teaches feminist perspectives of international law and is a founding member of the interest group feminism and international law, at the European Society of International Law. She's currently researching on post-conflict peace building and a gender analysis of the UK government's response to COVID-19. Loveday's research interests are in international human rights law, gender and sexuality. And she's published widely in these areas. She's a member of the editorial board of feminist legal studies. For number of years she was convener of the European Society of International Law Interest Group on feminism and international law. Thank you so much for joining us. It was a real pleasure for us to be a part of the project and to be able to contribute to the book. And so it's great to have a chance to talk about it today.

JESSIE: So I'm going to lead off on the questions. So ... the feminist judgments in international law book follows a tradition of feminist judgement writing projects that started in Canada and has spread to many national jurisdictions. But we're interested to know what prompted you to bring feminist judging to international law and what specific challenges you thought international law posed within the format.

TROY: I'll kick off first. I just want to say thank you for having us and it's a pleasure to be with you guys and it was wonderful to have you as part of the project. Great, great pleasure for both Loveday and I. What prompted us to, to do this project in general, I think was a great degree of frustration that there wasn't a project dealing with international law judgments. It was domestic judgements. And so we kind of looked on at other jurisdictions having these judgments and, and thought about it for ourselves. And it actually came up as part of the discussion when we did the founding Conference for the interest group under the European Society of International Law for feminism in international law. And that sort of got the ball rolling in terms of thinking about doing something in feminist judgments and we were close to people who were doing the English and Welsh version, domestic version of feminist judgments domestically. And I guess another reason was you, you go to conferences as a woman who is interested in feminism, in international law. And you always see the women's section at the end of the conference. So we're at 08:00 AM in the morning when nobody's there and you're sort of, you know, tired of looking at all the keynote speakers being white males in dark suits, talking about international law. And also our view of international law is quite essentially different from the very traditional view. And we wanted to get away from that hyper-masculinised patriarchal, state-centred, the state is all the focus in international law. And so I think it was a combination of frustration, looking on an envy at domestic projects and thinking about, yeah, let's do something a bit different. There seemed to be a ground swell of support for it. I think there's a lot of really good people who want to take feminist perspectives to international law and it was a way of channelling it through. So for us, what do you think Loveday?

LOVEDAY: Yeah, I agree. I think we, we realized that the challenge of bringing these projects to international law was quite considerable it took quite a bit of tweaking in terms of methodology and quite a lot of thought to make it relevant to international law tribunals and their decision-making, even the use of the word judgment, doesn't quite apply obviously to the output many tribunals and committees that deal with international law we knew we would have to do something a bit different for international law, but we wanted to, but we saw the potential, I think, to disrupt some of the very deeply entrenched normative values of international law and an opportunity to really carefully consider an alternative. Just in case anybody hasn't had a chance to see what we did in our project was to take 15 decisions of international tribunals and rewrite them in groups. from a feminist perspective. We thought there's a huge amount of work to be done here in terms of offering an alternative vision of international, which so entrenched as Troy said in masculinist and patriarchal thinking. So there was a really exciting opportunity here, but it certainly presented challenges in terms of the methodology, making this work for a range of international tribunals One other thing that we thought might be useful here was, I think in my experience international law is such a vast field now that the feminists working in that field tend to be quite disparate in their work. And I think what was really important to us and I think we'll probably discuss this a bit later in terms of collaboration, was to find some kind of project that could bring a diverse range of feminist international lawyers together in a way that seems relevant to a range of the sub-disciplines within international law. So that was another sort of an important inspiration for pursuing this idea.

KATHRYN: If I could just take you back perhaps to some of those previous projects, feminist judgment projects that you envied and that inspired you. and maybe you could say something about the particular lessons that you, that you learned from some of those?

LOVEDAY: So hands up here, they looked fun! Honestly that was the first thing that struck me when I heard about them particularly I have to say the Canadian project that began these projects, or is  the credited with beginning these projects, the idea that a group of feminist scholars found a way to engage with law, legal structures, with judgments, but also in a way that transcended the restrictions of that just seemed wonderful. I mean, just the description of how they sat around together and, in a pub - i may have imagined that bit and just said we've got to do law better It's just, I think that the kind of, the way that they, I don't know, there's so many barriers in academia to progressing your work. And the way they just said we're just going to do this. We are just going to inspire each other, work together, and do this. I mean that to me, there's a certain energy I think is what I'm trying to say, that clearly came across there that I just envied, I thought we can use some of that. That's certainly something that we found in our project. This, this idea that when feminists get together, they find ways, they're very pragmatic in terms of finding a way to actually do their work. And I think in these current times as well, we can use a lot of that energy. Yeah, so that was really wonderful. I think in my experience, the way I've written about international law, and how feminists engage with it, my own sense, and I know not everyone will share this view, but my own sense is that where feminism is useful is in how it can move between the periphery, and the centre of international law. And I think for me that that's an important way in which feminists can re-imagine and transform international law at the same time. Now, I appreciate there are challenges with not getting swamped in the centre, and finding yourself unable to make, to make that transformation. And I appreciate that there are, there's a sense in which being too peripheral makes one feel redundant. So I think that that movement seems to me important and so these judgment projects fitted that view that I have that transformation can come through that fitting between, the betwixt and between, moving between, that sense of movement and fluidity. And so that really excited me when I understood that that was one of the potentials that they offered. So and I think they, what's important, when you are asked to write to judgment, when you actually have to do the concrete work of writing a judgment, there's a sense in which I think you, in terms of the centre, you can't dismiss it or avoid it. Which for some people that makes the projects unattractive. But for me, it's the hard work of actually really demonstrating in unambiguous terms that this is how the law might be. And that to me was really exciting, in terms of the vision I have of what feminist work is doing when it engages with law. Troy I don't know if you want to add anything to that?

TROY: Well I support what you said about looking on in envy because it did look fun and we like doing things collaboratively. And the way the Canadian project was described to us, was like you said, they all got around restaurant and talked about what they didn't like, about section 15 under the charter, and how could they change it? And I think one of the things about writing a judgement as opposed to just writing an article. Not that an article is a "just", it takes a lot of work, but you are looking how the law would change as opposed to arguing how the law should change. So this is how the law would look in a judgment if you were to alter it. So it is that act of stepping in and making a change as opposed to sitting there and saying this is how I think reform should be tackled, or this is how I think it should be applied. So it was the fun aspect, having, having together, being together and workshops and getting to know people, that was a really enjoyable part of the project. And then also writing a judgment and going, there look this is how it would look differently. And you felt, even though a lot of it had to do with power dynamics and identifying power dynamics and trying to, you know, take away some of this power allocation. Anyway, you felt more powerful by writing a judgment, than you do an article. So, it's contradictory.

LOVEDAY: Can I just add one more thing? I think the, the sense that you were taking part in a discussion and a project that was bigger than your own contribution was also palpable. I think you're absolutely right to identify this as a step on a continuum. And we know that there are more projects coming, more projects that haven't yet been imagined, will happen in the future. And there's a wonderful sense in starting one of these projects and embarking on it, that you are supported by a wonderful groups of feminists who've gone before, who come along with you on your own project. And that there are wonderful feminist of the future, who will pick up on this work, and take it in new directions. That, that was also a really, on a personal level, that was really wonderful part of this project as well. Just that sense of connectedness across a range of feminist work.

JESSIE: And that's ... that's all, it's really interesting and there's certainly, I think, in participating in the project, I certainly felt a sense of excitement and a sense of collaboration, which was really, really fun and really great. So that sense of fun did carry over for sure into project. I really enjoyed it. But Kathryn and I had another question, which is kind of, I guess, a little bit provocative too. But you did mentioned the future projects that hadn't been written, but we wondered what judgment you would have liked to see in the book that you didn't end up having a rewritten judgment for, was there one case that you really thinking I wish we could have had that one. I would really love to see what people would do with rewriting that.

TROY: We, Loveday and I talked about this actually, you know, what one would we if, queen of the world, we put together another project or rewrite a judgment. In one sense, I would want to rewrite Nicaragua, and I'd want to re-write Nicaragua and make it really clear that all of the definition of the crime of aggression was customary law. And, and tie it up in a nice bow and make that clear. So I think that'd be one thing I would like to see. And but there's also a side of me which is a little bit crazy and would like to see the genocide cases, state responsibility for genocide being discussed as opposed to dismissed by the ICJ. And I think that in international criminal law, we've established now everything is going along in this, this identification of individual criminal responsibility, and we've rejected this idea of state responsibility, but I think that was a bit of a missed opportunity and I would've liked to write a judgment where that was founded. So they're, they're kind of my two picks.

LOVEDAY: Good choices. I think for me the real personal bug bear, I think maybe is the Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion. I think we could certainly have greater clarity, that feminist thinking would contribute to about the use of force and the nature of peace there. So that, that, that to me would be one of my top choices. I think certainly at the time of designing the project, there were areas of international law that we wanted to go into. we hoped for, like environmental law, international economic law, law of the sea, which they, feminist thinking does and can make a considerable contribution to. So that there's lots more work to be done which is, which is very exciting. Yeah, so, they offer opportunities. One discussion we had when designing the project was how much, first of all, how prescriptive we were about which judgments would be considered. And we kind of adopted a middle ground. I think, for one thing, to make sure certain judgments were included, but also leaving scope for people to rewrite judgments they had genuine interest in  and knowledge of and something to say about. So we kind of hit a middle ground. It does mean, and I think perhaps this mirrors feminist work in international law, that there is a preponderance of human rights cases in the collection. And it would be nice to see, I think we both would, even though that's my field, that it would be nice to really encourage, support and acknowledge feminist work that goes on outside of the, beyond the field of human rights and international criminal law as well so, yeah.

KATHRYN: Yeah I do think some of the most powerful judgements, and not just because Troy and my judgment is one of them, are the ones that don't immediately seem to be about feminist or women's issues. So yeah, I would love to see a volume two, with International Economic Law, law of the sea, if anybody wants to take that up. That would be amazing. I was wondering whether you'd heard back or engaged much with judges, for example, or anyone outside of the academic community in terms of the impact that the book, the project, has had?

LOVEDAY: I think there's a bit of a, perhaps a bit of a mea culpa here in that, not as much as we planned to and we'd like to have, but when we designed the project we certainly, the vision was that this, the value of the projects includes the capacity to speak to outside of academia. So we, I suppose I should say at the forefront, we had 50 participants in the project and that did include NGO workers, for instance. We wanted to make sure that it wasn't just academics thinking to ourselves. And that became an important part of the project, actually. We also had discussions with one or two judges, who came to speak to participants as well during the design of the project. And that was important to try to connect it to that real world process of judging if you'd like and to remind us of the potential relevance of what we're doing to the actual work of judges. But what we haven't done, partly, partly because of COVID, partly because we just haven't managed to catch our breath yet, is to think about in practical terms, how to take this to the maximum number of judges possible, and I for one, and I think Troy will agree, would really value any input in the best way of going about that and taking this to the judiciary. So we'll start with the mea culpa and say that maybe we should put more energy there, but I would also add that, I think, it's been true of other feminist judgments projects, that the impact that they've had on judicial thinking hasn't been as great as anyone hoped, so there is something to be said is that it's not as straightforward as emailing a judge, and get them interested in your work, I do find there's a resistance. So this isn't connecting in the way that the project designers, the project coordinators, anticipated. So there's something, I think there's more thinking to be done there about why that might be. Maybe we're getting, yeah, I honestly, I'm not sure what the answer to that is, I think that may be the next step in our thinking here really about asking that really hard question … to be quite negative as I am about that. But I think that the, there are barriers to accessing international judges, and domestic judges, like I say. I think that's been consistently across all the projects.

TROY: I agree Loveday, I think that as much as everyone wants judges to pick it up and read it and to become, you know, enlightened, or just sort of see a feminist approach, how it could work for them. We have a couple of judges on the back of the book, judge Howard Morrison and judge Elsie Nwanwuri Thompson, and so they were fantastic in that they responded to our, you know, wanting to put an endorsement on the back since it's a judgements project. And judge Howard Morrison came to the launch event talk about what it was like to be a judge and that kind of thing, to which we're really grateful for. But besides one of our launch events, we had a judge attend and said to us, I want to know how to do a feminist interpretation of a treaty. How do you do a feminist interpretation of a treaty, in a broad sense? So besides just going here read the reservations case. It's a case of sitting down and thinking about it. And like Kathryn said, the first group of judgements that are on general public international law. Sometimes you think, how can that be feminist to the readers just coming at the project, how can you have a feminist interpretation of Lotus? How can you have a feminist interpretation of Lockerbie or, or the reservations or the immunities case? But they are really important in that they take the traditional topics of international law and show you how you can access something through a feminist lens and apply it. So I do agree with Loveday that there are kind of barriers, and the domestic projects have said the same thing, with the American feminist legal studies group, they've talked about a couple of judgments, feminist judgments, being referred to in higher courts in the States. And I think that's also happened possibly in Australia, if I'm not wrong, but I think also we need to probably promote with judges more. So I think it's good, really good as a teaching tool, which we'll talk about later. But it's also good for other academics. But I think we need to promote as much as we can with judges. And so I don't know how far we'll get, but Our ideas were that we, once the book was out, we would have a next step, invite some judges and then have the authors kind of talk about, this was a feminist approach here. And I think looking at the variety of different feminist approaches, they can maybe get some ideas that might ring true with their own work, but it's certainly a hard egg to crack overall.

JESSIE: Yeah, maybe I can ask you a little bit about the teaching aspect now, because I've just finished teaching the public international law course here at UTS for the first time. The first time I taught public international law since 2007 actually. And so I felt like I was coming to it really sort of fresh, coming to the general public international law. And I finished teaching and then in preparing to speak to you, I got out the feminist judgment book again, and just really wanted to go back and teach all over again completely through the book, but hadn't, you know, it's not, it's not part of the course yet at UTS, but it just struck me as such a valuable resource for teaching, and particularly from my perspective, students, we often ask sort of discussion questions in seminars about what would've happened if the ICJ had said it would review security council resolutions? What would've happened if reservations, if it had taken a different approach to reservations to human rights treaties. And very often the students seem to have a, like an inability to think beyond the judgment once they've read it. It seems to me really striking how quickly students almost pick up that dominant paradigm of international law, and can't imagine international law in a different way. And so coming to the book, it seemed to me a really rich resource for teaching. And it would be interesting to hear about your experiences in teaching with it.

TROY: Thanks, I think that's really common. And I think your feelings about how students kind of coalesce with the mainstream teaching is very true. And, and I've tried to get feminism into our standard LLB international law course without success so far. And tried with my colleagues who said, why, why, why do you want this? You know, this is your research area. Why, why are you promoting your research area? And so I think you can, I think it's a hard sell for people who are very, have a very kind of traditional or black letter approach to international law. They don't see value in it. And they think it's, like Hilary Charlesworth said in her article, they see it as political, you're contextualizing things, you know, what's the importance of this? Where's the real law? So I think it's hard from that. Now Loveday and I do use the feminist judgments in our LLM class, which is feminist perspectives on international law. And so I've used about five of the judgments in that particular class. But it's a class about feminism that was presented as international law. So it really owns to that and the students really enjoyed it. And as part of their assessment, they got to either write an essay or write it rewrite a judgment. And so we had a couple that rewrote judgments, which is really fascinating and amazing to see what judgments they would pick. And I think it says a lot about yourself. What kind of judgment you want to do and how far you go with it. So I found that really rewarding, really interesting. And then we were part of this group that were discussing teaching feminist judgments and international, well feminist judgments internationally. So some were American, some were European, and a lot of it had to do with domestic jurisdictions. And a lot, I think in America they're doing a lot more feminist teaching in traditional LLB courses. And so I'd like us to sort of get that in there a bit more. So I think it would be nice to maybe throw a judgment in from like sources of international law, in as required reading in LLB courses. Because I think the people that go on to do an LLM and take our LLM course, are already kind of sold on the idea of a feminist perspective. So it's hard to break into mainstream. But I've found that when using the judgments, it's been a really rewarding experience and the students have responded really well, that's interesting, why did they do that? And they're quite questioning of the judgement, and why did they choose this? And they start asking me questions about other people's judgments and I have no idea why they chose that, or what have you. But it was, it was good because they were, usually they're critical of a text, and questioning, now they're critical of the judgment, which is quite a  refreshing thing to have. So I really, really enjoy using them for teaching, but my bug bear is to try to get it into mainstream LLB teaching if we can.

LOVEDAY: Some good news for Troy, I think we might be able to sneak feminism into our module next year, for undergraduate modules, so there may be hope, for spreading the word a bit more. I think it's, I mean, students seem to engage with the, these alternative judgments so well. And I think for me, the value in terms of critical thinking is it's just such a quick and immediate way of challenging the fear and respect that students usually offer to judgments and to law because I think it's so ingrained in our thinking that law is set in stone, that it is due, that it's not something that is contingent, and that was a wonderful opportunity, I think just to demonstrate to them that the kind of very human thinking that goes on behind these judgements and show, look, it could be done differently, don't be too respectful of these judgments, look at them with a critical and questioning mind. That's to me, that's the wonderful thing. in terms of a teaching tool. And as Troy said, and as I've said, the students, it just seems to capture their imaginations somehow, offer them something exciting, in terms of a way in to approaching the law from their own, adding their own voice to their legal studies and beginning to see that they can engage with this as individuals.

KATHRYN: Great. I wonder if now we might dig a bit deeper into some of that kind of methodological choices you made when doing the project. So compared to some of the earlier projects, this project was very deliberately collaborative. If you could say a little bit more about what inspired that choice, what were you hoping to achieve. And yeah, do you think it worked?

LOVEDAY: Honestly, I think, I think Troy will agree, it was actually bizarrely, a little, initially it wasn't at the centre of our thinking. So just to explain a little bit more about what's being asked here. Most of the judgment projects that proceeded us and that are continuing now, they involve a single individual adding a judgment in the common law sense, adding a voice to the judgment as it already stands. They're written, typically by individual authors, judges, to add their voice to into the mix. Clearly, with international tribunals anyway, we had to think differently about how to approach this, simply because for the most part, international decisions and judgments are written in one voice. Albeit with the possibility for individual and dissenting opinions to be annexed, it's attached to the main judgment. So we had to think differently anyway. So we were already asking those questions about how we do this. And then I think what surprised us when we had the planning meeting for the project, and we had a relatively small group of potential participants sitting around in Leicester discussing what the project might look like. And the enthusiasm with which the idea, that emerged that day, I think it's fair to say, that people may write their judgments collaboratively in small groups, just really, I think, surprised and pleased Troy and I. And it became very clear, I don't think there were any dissenting voices, that's absolutely how people wanted to proceed with writing the judgments in small groups. Now think that was partly because they're doing something different and having, the idea of having support in doing that, I think was, was attractive, but I think it's more than that. I think we are, I think for us in terms of challenging the way in which we normally work academically. It was seen as a real opportunity to do things a bit differently. There is so much emphasis, I'm not sure what you, I'm not honestly sure what the Australian version of REF is, but in our research framework exercise, I don't even know, what does REF stand for, I'm not even sure anymore, but in our research assessment, the emphasis on authorship, on the individual working alone, this vision we have that knowledge is owned by an individual, created by an individual in isolation, put out there, that they get credit for that individual piece of work, it belies so much of the way we experience the world and the way that we work, the contribution that others make to our work, the debt that we owe to others, the inspiration that we may offer to others, that it just seemed, I don't know, there just seemed something far more, that reflects far more way in which we really work. And the idea that collaboration is at the centre of most things that we do. So that was, so in terms of wanting to challenge that vision of academic work that, that seemed to me to be really exciting and useful. There were two other things I'd like to say. One is, there was also, given what I think I've said previously about how disparate feminist work in the field of international law, the idea of offering an opportunity to pull people together to work together, seemed to be strategically, politically important and useful, to find a way to bring people together. I think that's one of the successes of the project, if you like, it offered a physical space, a platform, for a variety of feminists working in international law to come together, so that that was really important and successful. The, and I think, the other thing that we embedded in the project with this idea of mutual support. So without wishing to, without being able to entirely avoid hierarchical thinking, we wanted to create groups of people coming into the project with different range of experiences, who could support each other in different ways. And I think for me, one of the greatest pleasures of the project has been seeing PhD students, who were supported by their group, and in going on, having had this experience, having received some support, to start some wonderful careers in academia. And that was deliberate. I think we've been picked up on the way in which we thought about hierarchy, but it's certainly in, in practical terms, I think the support offered within the groups was immensely important. And I can see, I do consider that one of the achievements. Troy I don't know if you want to pick up on that and maybe say something about the challenges, because getting real about how difficult it was as well.

TROY: Yeah, sure. I think that all the things that Loveday said about wanting to work collaboratively is true. You want the support, it's nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of. And plus, if you're trying to do something that's a bit more activist, you can say what do you think about that, do you think it's okay? And from what other judges have said, you know, they, this is the way they work. They bounce ideas, they have discussions, and then they get around to sort of sketching out what a judgment may be. And I think the fact that in our project, the, the author's note and the judgment itself and the reflection are all written by the same group of people, gives them this sense of, here we're going to describe what the original judgement and what the new judgement offers. We're going to do the judgment, then we're going to do the reflection about how we felt and what we have. But it does pose challenges, you know, working together. It's part of the overall thought about feminist methodology, it's about discussion, dialogue, collaboration, back and forth, agreement, disagreement, you know, space for a different view. So that's all part of it. But in a practical sense, you do have people that come in and out of the project, that couldn't contribute to the end or couldn't contribute because of workloads. You had people that looked like a really good chamber and then, it for whatever reason, because we did go on for a few years, fell away. So there were challenges in that. People couldn't necessarily go through all the way. Some chambers got together physically a lot, and that was quite helpful. And if you look at our chamber, of course, Kathryn, we couldn't get together physically because we were separated by land and water and all the rest of it. So you had some chambers that had access to each other in quite an informal way, then others that didn't, that had to make use of new technologies that seem very normal now in the COVID world. So I think you had to overcome all those kinds of challenges. And every group was different, and every chamber acted differently, every dynamic was different. And that's life. And that's part of how we interact as researchers and how we interact as people. So I think it's, I think everything you said was very relevant. And yeah, there were challenges to overcome. People who, like you said, came and went, had different views. But in the end we didn't have, we always said to them, you know, if you guys disagree, you can do a dissenting opinion or a separate opinion as long as your court allowed it, whatever court you're writing. So there was a space for differences that could be, that could be acknowledged. And there turned out not to be, we had one separate but concurring opinion. And then in the head scarf case, I really like the idea that they invented this mythical judge, and the mythical judge could identify certain sort of stereotypical views and then they could bounce off that in their judgment. So I think people thought creatively as well as sometimes having to overcome great challenges when you work collaboratively. So certainly it was really interesting to work in that way.

JESSIE: And another contrast with other feminists judgments projects that you introduced was the reflection that you mentioned, which I guess is another particularly feminist move, to include a reflection on your work. Can you talk to us a little bit about your choice to include a reflection and whether you were pleased or surprised by the results of these reflections.

TROY: Yes, the idea for reflection came from our LLM module in feminist perspectives of international law. We introduce that there as a teaching technique to get the students, we found that some LLM classes were a bit slow and they had to bring in something that wasn't on the reading list and introduce it and how it was related to the topic of that particular seminar or workshop and then discuss it. And then write it up in a reflective blog and how it helped you learn about the subject at the end. And we thought, instead of doing this sort of standard conclusion or what have you, because different projects have had different sort of endings. We thought it'd be nice if there was a space for the personal side. And we thought this was also quite a feminist thing to do, was to offer a space for people to talk about what it was like and every reflection was different. We're really pleased. I think I'm speaking on behalf of Loveday, she can nod her head if she agrees, I think we're really pleased with the reflections. And I think other people have said, oh, the reflections were really enjoyable. Di Otto mentioned she really enjoyed the reflections. And someone had said to us at one of the beginnings, they said, don't go ahead with this reflection thing, you're just going to have the same thing repeated over and over again. But I'm glad we didn't take that advice and I'm glad we stuck with the reflection. I think every one was different and every one was unique. And it was kind of an interesting thing. And you'd go through this long drawn out process of meeting and sketching out a judgment and then working through the wording and then getting your first edits back and going, how do we change this? How do we adapt this? How do we make this better? And then you want a space, I kind of want to add a reflection now to everything else I write, because I want a space where I could talk about what it was like to do that. Because, you know, this is, this is my personal experience or this is our group experience, this is what happened. So I think it's, it, it came from teaching. So it's teaching informed research, really, as opposed to research informed teaching. And then it morphed into something that I think really fit the feminist methodological mould. And I think overall it's been a tremendous, a tremendous thing. I think maybe we should have a book of reflections, just generally in life.

LOVEDAY: I think the value of the reflections is twofold, one I think it really underlines the fact that the judgments were contingent and that they were written by real people. It just demonstrates that point really clearly. That there were choices made deliberately, there were difficult choices, debates going on underneath the judgments. It kind of punctures that, that idea of the judgment as something that somehow drops down from above. So I think that's one of the values, the other, I think there was almost a relief amongst the groups. They had to knit together for the purpose of  judgement writing, and it was almost like the reflection was a debriefing, and kind of a coming apart again, and just being able to express the experiences they had, often as an individual, often interestingly, often groups chose to write that from their individual perspectives, they just wanted to untangle the process, and say how they experienced it as individuals, having come together, and tangled their ideas together into, knitted to their ideas, perhaps I should say, into a judgment, now let's unravel that a bit. And yeah, we become individuals again, so very interesting, as Troy says, a lot of people have commented very favourably on the reflection, found them interesting, so very, very glad that we included that.

KATHRYN: Yeah, I also enjoyed writing the reflection actually, particularly in terms of having a chance to kind of work out some of those frustrations. Like we wanted to include this, but we couldn't, or it was really hard to come to a decision. And it looks like we've maybe just picked a side to come down on, but actually that was a really kind of wrenching thing to do, to have to kind of put a marker down and state your position. So it was kind of nice to be able to then do a bit of a feminist move and start qualifying everything again in the reflection. Okay, you mentioned Di Otto there and she recently published a review of the book in which she wondered "whether and to what extent it might be possible to make transformative findings within the parameters of conventional judicial practices, findings that go beyond merely including women and sexual, gender and other minorities in the mainstream legal status quo, and move towards disrupting and re-envisioning the masculinist and imperial foundations of international law" and I was quoting her words there. And she said she found herself pleasantly surprised in that respect and picked a Burden and Lotus as the two re-written judgments that we her kind of favourites, in terms of being transformative. And so what kind of spaces do you think the book opened up for creativity and transformation?

LOVEDAY: It's a big question and like I say, certainly the hope that I had going into it was this idea that you are working with the centre of international law, but from a peripheral perspective, would, would provide invaluable insight. And I think, the, the insight that we go from adopting this kind of pluralist approach to international law was really valuable in showing the potential. But I certainly, I think there were a lot of the normative values contained in international law that were questioned within our project. Alternatives offered, and in some cases, very clear steps to how this area of law might be looked at differently, with very different outcomes that might emerge if we only thought about that one question, that one value, contained in international law differently. I think, I suppose at the end of the day there were, there were two things that I think were clear. One is the, the practices of international tribunals, the norms of international law, are very, very hard nuts to crack, so a lot of groups I think found themselves given the constraints of working within a methodology that played at least with legal form, they found that, they found that reaching the kind of transformative conclusions that they wanted to was perhaps impossible, reaching the full extent of their vision for international law. So that's certainly true, and certainly I think in the reflections a lot of groups said, we couldn't do what we wanted to do within this context. But on the other hand, I think the very fact that the ... I think the one thing that we notice is, international law is very open-textured, surprisingly open textured, it's actually a giant playing field for creativity and imaginative possibilities. Perhaps compares very favourably in that sense to domestic law projects. There's a lot more scope in my view for this kind of creative thought being applied to both the values and practices of international law. And I think that the project showed that in each and every chamber there, no matter what scale they were thinking of. Because our chambers ranged obviously in terms of the approach they adopted, there was a plurality of feminist thinking brought to bear on the project. But I think each chamber showed the value in challenging, whether it's one particular norm of international law, or whether it's the practice of a tribunal. And there were some who, as you say, thought on a very big scale, about the whole foundational values of international law, particularly the early ones like the Lotus judgment, for instance, that Di Otto pinpointed. So, but across the board, I think each one demonstrated the significant contribution that feminist thinking can make. And I suppose we're now in a process of thinking, how do we do a translation? Going back to your question about judicial engagement with the project. How do we transform? How do we transform? How do we make that into something that makes a difference?

TROY: I, I think that's a really good analysis, Loveday and far from, I'm really grateful that Di did such a lovely review of the project and of the book. And, and she was at the launch event where we originally discussed doing the book. So she's been a great supporter all the way through. And I think her choices, Burden and Lotus, now Bozkurt in the book, are really, really good choices. You know, Burden because of the re-evaluation of the relationship from traditional marriage to the two women. And then the Bozkurt case where the whole emphasis is put towards the victims. And the emphasis is put on under picking sovereignty in international law and then coming up with the Bozkurt principle, which is about international cooperation. So I see why she's chosen those, but I really enjoyed and I think there's transformative elements of a lot of different chapters in the book. And I really enjoyed some of the things that were themes that ran throughout. So you had these groups of people working in different parts of the world in different ways. And yet a lot of them identified what the situation of the individuals involved. A lot of them identify the marginalized groups, a lot of them identified intersectionality, like you had in Gómez-Limón, where they talked about discrimination, pay and, sorry, Social Security pay and being put on leave. Then you had the Reservations Case where they talked about this two-pronged mechanism to deal with the impact of reservations. So I thought that was, that was quite transformative. But then looking at the, I think the human rights cases are fairly obvious in terms of these other people, these suffered these wrongs, and these are how the court should have dealt with them from a feminist perspective. And some of them dealt with interpreting margins of appreciation or what have you. And talking about Goodwin, Loveday's chamber, looking at, I like the quote I think that Hilary made, and the conclusion was that international law is an anti-queer device that has been applied in many ways and in this case. So I think that acknowledging limitations is also really important and can also be transformative as well as a principle that is acknowledged or what have you. So I think that decentralising the state and the first few chapters that deal with the more traditional views of international law. This focus on decentralising state, looking at power allocations, that's really important in each of those particular things. And of course then in the latter cases, the international criminal law cases, dealing with the silences, the position of, of girls when it comes to child soldiers, their experience is vastly different to boy child soldiers. Or looking at the cases that dealt with the sexual slavery and those kind of implications when it comes to international criminal law, identifying sort of tags to put on different charges and how limiting they can be. So I think a lot of the chapters lean towards transformative changes in their own way, or transformative elements in their own way, whether it's through not just principles they identify, but how they came to the conclusion or what, acknowledging silences or whether it has to do with picking apart these un-challengeable things in international law, as Loveday's talk about the centre. And Kell v Canada, Jessie, shout out, film theory. You know, I found that really interesting in your judgment, and I thought that was quite, quite a unique kind of thing. So I encourage people to read through the different judgments. There's so many different unique and interesting things in, in all of the chapters that you'll find a real value. And because each group is different, everybody, everybody tackled it differently. And of course, myself and Kathryn feel quite strongly about Lockerbie because we wanted to make a statement about power dynamics and international law. So yes, it's about judicially reviewing a Security Council resolution, but it's also looking at the, how the Security Council's dominated by certain states and that that essentially needs reform and looking towards a more activist ICJ in the future. So I think there's transformative elements in various ways. Everyone's different and everybody's, you know, everybody's out to interpretation. So I look at it as a whole. There's a lot of lovely themes running through the book that I think will give people cause reflection.

JESSIE: I want to follow on from that a little bit actually to talk about transformation and the resistances that international law might put up on that. Just because in the introduction you talk about the project being born from an optimism about international law's transformative potential and the frustration at it's frequent failure to bring about meaningful change. And I just wondered where you are on that continuum at the end of the project, how you feel about that balance now?

LOVEDAY: I'm not sure that my position has, in terms of the frustrations, has dramatically changed, I, but perhaps my optimism has increased from seeing the shared energy and interest, this amazing group of people who came together to participate in the project had in thinking about international law differently into demonstrating what that might look like and the kind of enthusiasm with which our students engage in those conversations also gives me cause for optimism about how this might be done differently. But I don't think there's any argument that if you embark on these kind of projects, it's a slow process of transformation. I think we, I think we probably have to acknowledge that this is not a revolutionary type of project. It's a transformative type of project that plays the long game, which is, I guess, which taps into some frustration. But also, as I said, going back to how it feels to be part of these projects,  you do feel like, or at least it's possible to believe you're on a journey towards transformation and that you're walking alongside many other wonderful people. So there's my cause for optimism and yeah, so I think that's probably what I have to say about that. I don't know if Troy's got anything more concrete to say or whether she ...

TROY: Not really, I think, I think we're cautiously optimistic. I think international law is slowly changing. To a certain extent when you go to different events and that. I think you're heard a bit more than you were before. So and I think there's a groundswell of people out there who are interested in researching in this area and taking a feminist approach to different aspects of international law. And I think it was, it's been growing. And it was more the few, you know, and now it's becoming, I think, more interesting and more accepted. So I'm cautiously optimistic, but at the same time, you know, Donald Trump's in the White House. And so as a realist, you sort of feel, how far are we getting, where's the discussion going? So there's, there's still a great rejection of internationalism and that's a bit sad, but overall, I think things will be changing with international law. And I think it just means that we grow in terms of people who are sharing the same thoughts, sharing the same level of critique, and sharing the same kinds of concerns that we all have about international law. So cautiously optimistic, yeah!

KATHRYN: That seems like a good cautiously optimistic note on which to bring our time to an end. It's been wonderful talking to you and hearing a bit more in depth about, about the project and reminiscing about the fun that was had. Thank you, thank you so much.

TROY: Can we ask a question of you? What's your favourite thing about the project? Since we've been, we've been answering all the questions.

JESSIE: Do you want to go ahead Kathryn?

KATHRYN: Sure, I mean, to go back to something you said right at the beginning, that for me the chance, because I was  kind of randomly allocated a chamber, and it was great to kind of meet some people and work with people that I never would have or probably wouldn't have worked so closely with otherwise. And the kind of the energy and the inspiration that came from the workshops was, was special. And yeah, and also to, to work on something that I don't actually normally work on in my, in my research life, looking at sanctions and the Security Council, that was a little bit out of my comfort zone, so that was also great for me.

JESSIE: You know, I really enjoyed writing the reflection actually, because it isn't normally the type of thing that you get to do. And to do that with, particularly to do that after working on a collaborative piece which was at moments really collaborative and at moments more antagonistic. And then to be able to work all that through and to put that on paper and to discuss how that had all come out. That was a really, really valuable experience. So for me, I can't even imagine what this project would have been like if we hadn't done the reflections. You know it seems to me that all those other feminist judgments projects, they need to go back and give their authors an opportunity to write reflections because they're incomplete without them, so that to me was great.

TROY: Well, thank you.

LOVEDAY: Yeah. Thank you so much for your time today and also for being wonderful participants in the project. It's been lovely to have a chance to talk about it at greater length so thank you.

KATHRYN & JESSIE: Thank you very much.