Scholar of law Philippe Sands will give the LaFeber-Silbey Lecture in History on March 5 at 4:45 p.m. in Goldwin Smith G64. His lecture is titled “A World Without Law? Lessons from History and Literature, from Nuremberg to Pinochet and Beyond.”

Credit: Provided

The event is co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Department of Literatures in English/the Cornell Creative Writing Program in the College of Arts and Sciences and will be livestreamed. 

“Sands is a remarkable figure, someone who has not only written very incisive accounts about how international legal norms came to be, but has also contributed to strengthening them in the last three decades,” said Nicholas Mulder, assistant professor of history and Milstein Faculty Fellow (A&S). “In our era of disintegration and unaccountability, the strong Enlightenment strain in his outlook is especially powerful: no individual, no state, and no human activity should be beyond the reach of universal principles of justice. As a public intellectual who ranges widely across history, politics and law and is a phenomenal writer, we are thrilled to welcome him to Cornell.”

Sands is Professor of Law at University College London and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard. He is a practicing barrister at the firm 11KBW, appears as counsel before the International Court of Justice and other international courts and tribunals, and sits as an international arbitrator. 

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.