Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

The Faculty of Law has a thriving calendar of lectures and seminars spanning the entire gamut of legal, political and philosophical topics. Regular programmes are run by many of the Faculty's Research Centres, and a number of high-profile speakers who are leaders in their fields often speak at the Faculty on other occasions as well. Audio recordings from such events are published in our various podcast collections. Video recordings are available via YouTube.

  1. 21h ago

    Superjustice: Law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Joint CELS, CPL, CPLC and CIPIL Event

    Chair: Professor Markus Gehring, CELS This seminar and book discussion will focus on how artificial intelligence is rapidly expanding the supply of legal reasoning, but how it does not by itself produce justice. Superjustice asks what legal systems should look like when constraints of scarcity, delay, and inconsistency can increasingly be relaxed by computation. Rather than simply digitising existing institutions, Benjamin Alarie and Samuel Becher argue in their new OUP book with the same title for redesigning law as a more accessible, responsive, and adaptive framework for human flourishing. The talk and discussion will explore how AI could make legal guidance more broadly available, support more dynamic and personalized legal systems, and change the roles of judges, lawyers, educators, and policymakers. It will also confront the harder questions raised by this transformation, including bias, transparency, privacy, procedural justice, and institutional legitimacy. Speaker: Benjamin Alarie is the Osler Chair in Business Law at the University of Toronto and co-founder and CEO of Blue J, an AI platform for tax used at thousands of accounting and law firms. He has spent more than a decade applying artificial intelligence to tax and law and coined the term “legal singularity” in 2016. In addition to Superjustice (Oxford University Press, 2026) he is co-author of The Legal Singularity (University of Toronto Press, 2023), which won the 2024 AAP PROSE Award and was shortlisted for the Donner Prize. He holds an LL.M. from Yale Law School and clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for Justice Louise Arbour. Discussants: Dr Emilija Leinarte, Deputy Director of CELS, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and a fellow of Corpus Christi CollegeProfessor Christoph Winter is Assistant Professor of Law and AI at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), University of Cambridge For more information see: https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

  2. 1d ago

    Meet the Committee | CULSCAST Conversations Episode 8

    In this episode, Janice speaks to various members of the Law Society to give you an insight into the committee and the many roles that help keep the society running. From the Non-Law Per Incuriam Master of Moots to the Welfare Officer, Competitions, Foreign Affairs, Careers and Social Officers, there is so much to discover about what goes on behind the scenes, and much more. A huge thank you to everyone who took part and shared their time and insights with us!

  3. 1d ago

    'Koskenniemi’s Lauterpacht: A 'Gentle Civilizer'?' - Prof Robert Schütze, University of Durham

    Lecture summary: Hersch Lauterpacht’s normative project has been subject to a number of excellent studies in the past – most notably by Martti Koskenniemi. The central image of the latter’s ‘Lauterpacht’ is, famously, that of a backward-looking thinker: Lauterpacht is portrayed as a ‘natural lawyer’ who nostalgically looks back into the 19th century as the last representative of a ‘Victorian tradition’ in international law. This talk wishes to critique and challenge this influential intellectual portrait. In order to do this, it revisits Lauterpacht’s rich academic oeuvre in three parts. Part 1 begins with a reconstruction of Lauterpacht’s understanding of the judicial function – a function on which much of Koskenniemi’s Lauterpacht hinges. Part 2 explores the legislative function within Lauterpacht’s international legal order, while Part 3 investigates the ‘function’ given to natural law in Lauterpacht’s normative project. Against this reconstructed background, Koskenniemi’s ‘Lauterpacht’ will be re-evaluated; and a conclusion contends that Lauterpacht is best characterized as a utopian international federalist, whose supranational legacy has largely remained unredeemed. Robert Schütze is Professor of European and Global Law. He is a constitutional scholar with a particular expertise in the law of the European Union and comparative federalism. He co-founded the Durham Global Policy Institute with the political scientist David Held and also teaches at LUISS (Rome) as well as the College of Europe (Bruges). In the past, he has held numerous Visiting Professorships and was, for example, a Fulbright-Schuman Fellow at Harvard University and a Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute. He has published extensively on European Union law and (some) public international law and is best known for his “federal” reading of the European Union. As an editor, he co-founded, the Oxford Comparative Constitutionalism Series and he also co-directs the Oxford European Union Library as well as the Hart Series on Parliamentary Democracy in Europe. He is a joint co-editor of the Yearbook of European Law – OUP’s flagship journal on the law of the European Union. Chair: Dr John Barker, Centre Fellow This lecture is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lectures series held on 30 October 2026.

  4. Oct 27

    Equity in Distress: Justice and Fairness in Business Rescue: 3CL Seminar

    Speaker: Professor Edward Janger, the David M. Barse Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, USA Abstract: The goal of the book is to flesh out concepts of equity and fairness that are embedded (but often overlooked) in the law of corporate governance and the Bankruptcy Code. The main themes of the book have been developed in prior work of mine and with others. The concept of "equity" in financial distress is developed in Jacoby and Janger, "Tracing Equity," 96 Tex. L. Rev. 673 (2018), and developed further in "Equitable Duty: Regulating Corporate Transactions in the Vicinity of Insolvency from a Comparative Perspective, in Arthur Laby and Jacob Hale Russell eds. Fiduciary Obligations in Business (CUP 2021). The competing concerns about process -- coercion and holdouts -- are worked through in Jacoby and Janger, "Ice Cube Bonds: Allocating the Price of Process in Chapter 11 Cases", 123 Yale L.J. 862 (2014), Janger and Levitin, "One Dollar, One Vote: Mark to Market Governance in Bankruptcy, 104 Iowa L. Rev. 1857 (2019), and Janger and Levitin, "Badges of Opportunism: Principles for Policing Restructuring Support Agreements, 13 Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial, and Commercial Law 169 (2018). Finally, in "The Proceduralist Inversion, 130 Yale L.J. Forum 335 (2020), I seek (with Levitin) to establish the link between process and entitlement in debt adjustment negotiations. Most recently, in "Equity for Intermediaries: The Resolution of Financial Firms in Bankruptcy and Bank Resolution," 41 Yale J. Reg. 965 (2024), I attempt to pull it all together by developing a concept I call, "constitutive equity." The interconnections between these essays and articles, are, I suspect, apparent only to me. My goal, in the book, is to link the themes in a concise and readable fashion. As you will see, I have a ways to go in that regard. Professor Edward Janger is the David M. Barse Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. He teaches and writes in the areas of bankruptcy law, commercial law, consumer credit and data privacy. His articles have appeared in the Illinois Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Texas Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. Recent scholarship explores issues of value allocation and governance in Chapter 11 cases, cross-border bankruptcy, resolution of systemically important financial institutions, and the treatment of financial contracts in bankruptcy. He is co-director of the Center for the Study of Business Law & Regulation at Brooklyn Law School. 3CL runs the 3CL Sullivan & Cromwell 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/

  5. Oct 19

    'Adjudicating over Anarchy: Judicial Remedies, Compliance and Enforcement in International Law' - Prof Geraldo Vidigal, University of Amsterdam

    Without the ability to mobilise coercive measures, international adjudicators must rely on their authority to influence real-world outcomes. This lecture considers the origin and conceivable uses of the authority of international adjudicators. International courts’ influence relies on their ability to mobilise, through mere authoritative communications, the different internal and external forces that shape state behaviour, influencing the views of individuals within states and shaping mutual expectations of cooperative and sanction-worthy behaviour. For this, international courts have at their disposal a variety of communicative instruments: their judicial remedies. Though all judicial remedies are, at their core, modalities of interpretation and application of norms, their varied focuses allow adjudicators to calibrate the exercise of their authority. The lecture develops on concepts outlined in Dr. Vidigal’s 2026 monograph, Adjudicating over Anarchy: Judicial Remedies, Compliance, and Enforcement in International Law (Cambridge University Press). The book establishes a fourfold typology of international judicial remedies – Mere Adjudication, Declaration of Breach, Consequential Duties, and Permissible Responses – each targeting a specific element of the international normative framework. Through different remedies, adjudicators interpret the normative framework, establish violations, and determine conduct required to restore lawful relations. The fourth category of remedies, often left untapped, encompasses judicial determinations of permissible responses to breach: what measures other actors may take to respond to violations, compelling wrongdoers to comply with their obligations and provide redress for injury. If fully explored, this fourth category might reshape the prevailing understanding of the relationship between international adjudication and coercive enforcement. Geraldo Vidigal is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, where he coordinates the LL.M. in International Trade and Investment Law. He is Editor-in-Chief of Legal Issues of Economic Integration, sits on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of International Economic Law and the Latin American and Caribbean Journal of International Law, and is a member of the Executive Council of the Society of International Economic Law. He holds a PhD in Law (University of Cambridge), a Master’s in International Law and International Organisations (Sorbonne – Paris 1), and a Bachelor’s in Law (University of São Paulo). He has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Luxembourg, and a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, and a Dispute Settlement Lawyer at the World Trade Organization. Besides Adjudicating over Anarchy, he is co-editor (with Kathleen Claussen) of The Sustainability Revolution in International Trade Agreements (Oxford University Press, 2024). Chair: Dr Jamie Trinidad This lecture was delivered on 16 October 2026 as part of the Centre's Friday Lunchtime Lecture series.

  6. Oct 16

    AI's Impact on legal education: Cambridge Women in Law

    On Friday 18 September 2026 Cambridge Women in Law held this panel event as part of the Cambridge Alumni Festival. AI is shaping all walks of life. This is particularly true in respect of the law. Litigants rely on ChatGPT to submit their complaints and lawyers have access to databases of precedents, search tools and the capacity for AI to manage vast numbers of documents, often better than humans. This raises the question whether there is still a need for lawyers and, for the Faculty of Law at Cambridge, what this means for the law degree. In this session leading Cambridge academics and practitioners debate the challenges and opportunities for legal education posed by the ever-increasing availability and capacity of AI tools. Speakers: Professor Louise MerrettProfessor Louise GulliferProfessor Catherine BarnardProfessor Felix SteffekJonathan ChamberlainAnneliese Day KC For more information and to sign up to the CWIL mailing list to receive information about future news and events, see https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/alumni-developmentalumni-events/cambridge-women-law-cwil

  7. Oct 14

    Towards a Value-Based Union Citizenship: Trust, Democracy, and Solidarity: CELS Lunchtime Seminar

    Speaker: Dr Luke Dimitrios Spieker, Humboldt University, Berlin Abstract: The CJEU’s decision in Commission v Malta marks the summit of a long-standing, highly controversial debate in European legal scholarship. Considering the Maltese practice of “golden passports” incompatible with EU law, the Court expanded the reach of EU law and established constraints for the conferral of the Member States’ nationalities. At its heart, the decision developed a shared concept of nationality based on a “special relationship of solidarity and good faith”. To justify this bold step, the Court mobilized EU values: “Union citizenship” – we are told – “is based on the common values contained in Article 2 TEU”. In this talk, we will explore how EU values may require a shared concept of nationality and justify the genuine link-requirement established by the Court. At its centre are the notions of democracy and trust, solidarity and belonging. Ultimately, it seems that the Court embraced a communitarian understanding of citizenship – one that builds on belonging. Biography: Dr Luke Dimitrios Spieker is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University Berlin and a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. His research explores EU law’s constitutional foundations, including its common values and structural principles as well as Union citizenship and fundamental rights. He has been awarded several prizes, such as the Heinz Meier-Leibnitz-Prize of the German Research Foundation, the UACES Best Book Prize, or the Common Market Law Review Prize for Young Academics. For more information see: https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

  8. Oct 12

    Dear Freshers... A Word of Advice...| CULSCAST Conversations Episode 7

    In this episode, Janice chats to Jack, Nicholas and Mira about the realities of being a fresher and making the most of your first year at university. Jack and Nicholas are third-year Law students, while Mira is a third-year History student, bringing together different perspectives and plenty of hard-earned wisdom. The conversation covers three key areas: Academic life: settling into lectures, seminars and independent study, finding what works for you, and managing the transition to university-level work. Social life: making friends, finding your people, navigating Freshers’ Week, and dealing with the pressure to have the “perfect” university experience. Extracurriculars and careers: getting involved in societies and events, making the most of opportunities, and starting to think about your career, whatever your degree. Tune in for practical advice and honest reflections on making the most of your first year. A special thanks to Jack, Mira, and Nicholas for sharing their thoughts and to Daniel Bates for his excellent pre- and post-podcast bants.

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The Faculty of Law has a thriving calendar of lectures and seminars spanning the entire gamut of legal, political and philosophical topics. Regular programmes are run by many of the Faculty's Research Centres, and a number of high-profile speakers who are leaders in their fields often speak at the Faculty on other occasions as well. Audio recordings from such events are published in our various podcast collections. Video recordings are available via YouTube.

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