Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge
  • 3.4 (5)
  • Education

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. 2d ago

    To Master the Law | CULSCAST Conversations Episode 9

    In today’s episode, we are joined by Samuel Soh, Qinglan Du, and Joyce Mau to discuss their experiences pursuing postgraduate law degrees. Samuel completed the BCL at Oxford, Joyce pursued an LLM at Harvard, and Qinglan completed an LLM at Cambridge. We discuss how to choose the right master’s programme, funding opportunities, the academic experience, key lessons learned, what sets each programme apart, social life, and much more. A huge thank you to Samuel, Qinglan, and Joyce for taking the time to join us and share their experiences on the podcast!

  2. 5d ago

    Memorization & Regurgitation in European and German Copyright Law: CIPIL Evening Seminar

    Speaker: Dr Julia Möller-Klapperich, Freie Universität Berlin Abstract: Art is, first and foremost, something deeply personal, yet at the same time a form of communication that is relevant to society. Copyright law therefore balances between the interests of the artist and those of society. If something has relevance within a market economy, it can in general be monetised. Whilst innovation is increasingly understood politically as the ability to capitalise a personal or societal need, the democratising effect that characterises art as a human phenomenon and as a space for societal resonance is visibly eroding, giving way to a digitalisation-driven centralisation of what is publicly perceptible and, with it, a concentration of power on an unprecedented scale. Legal science must counter this development, to develop meaningful concepts of innovation through interdisciplinary discourse, and to design legal rules that take appropriate account of the social functions of art and AI. The issue of memorisation lies at the heart of this conflict and is therefore highly controversial. The European Commission has recently launched a consultation on the challenges and way forward regarding the impact of technology on copyright. While the legislature is assessing the situation, courts — including those in Germany — must decide on various cases based on current legislation. It remains unclear whether representing information extracted from copyright-protected works in an AI model constitutes a reproduction under copyright law. In two notable rulings, German courts have ruled in favour of a collecting society that initiated legal proceedings against AI providers. The decisions focus on establishing the facts and proving a physical reproduction as depicted in the model. However, the problem is that due to the technical functioning of the model, this physical reproduction cannot be identified within it. For this reason, the literature considers that, at least in a technical sense, no reproduction has taken place. This talk attempts to shift the discussion from establishing the facts to legal interpretation in cases where the facts cannot be sufficiently clarified. This approach is based on the balance of interests embodied in copyright law. Furthermore, the allocation of responsibilities between the courts and the legislature in addressing unclear technological issues is considered in the assessment. Biography: Dr. Julia Möller-Klapperich, LL.M., is the Academic Director of the Master's programme in Business, Competition and Regulatory Law at Freie Universität Berlin, where she is also a Habilitandin. She holds a Master's degree from Dresden University of Technology and a PhD from the Technical University of Freiberg. Prior to joining FU Berlin, she was a research associate at the Scads.AI AI competency centre Dresden/Leipzig. Her main research focus is the regulation of emerging technology markets. For more information see: https://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk/seminars-and-events/cipil-seminars

  3. 6d ago

    Social Pathology in EU law: CELS Seminar

    Speaker: Dr Ana Bobić, Hertie School, Berlin Abstract: The European Union exhibits a fundamental ambiguity: it strives to be a political community that delivers to its citizens freedom, equality, and other values in Article 2 TEU, but on closer inspection, the emancipation it promotes is grounded predominantly in market rationality. In other words, the EU seeks to build a socio-political community, but its means of doing so remain contingent upon their economic contribution of those living in its territory. The Member States too are an important part of this story: they contribute to the creation of such laws and insist on being the primary sites of reproducing political membership and identity. The aim of this talk is to uncover what the EU takes itself to be as a polity (a political community of values) and analysing the contradictions that arise from how it puts these claims into practice. To do so, I use the concept of social pathology developed in social theory. A social pathology may be defined as a dysfunctionality that is the result of a social dynamic – a self-reproducing nexus of collective practices – that, apart from its connection to injustice, diminishes the good (or impedes the ends) of those who participate in those practices. A social pathology is more than just a breach of the law, an injustice to an individual, or even structural injustice: it is a self-perpetuating dynamic that is difficult to break from. The focus is thus not actions of individuals or specific judgments and decisions, but the relationship between law and broader social practices and institutions. This novel approach allows us to see how EU and national law jointly and over time stratify humans into hierarchies based on economic merit, contrary to its proclaimed values of freedom and equality. Juxtaposing the EU’s value claims with social reality will allow us to see the broader distribution of privileges and burdens among the people living in the EU’s territory. Biography: Ana Bobić is a Senior Researcher at the Hertie School, member of the Editorial Board of the Common Market Law Review, and currently a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute. Her research is on the EU’s constitutional theory, judicial interactions in the EU, the constitutional implications of the EMU, and the philosophical aspects of belonging in the EU. Ana is the author of two books, The Jurisprudence of Constitutional Conflict in the EU (OUP 2022) and The Individual in the Economic and Monetary Union. A Study of Legal Accountability (CUP 2024). For more information see: https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

  4. Nov 3

    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

  5. Nov 2

    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!

  6. Nov 2

    '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.

  7. 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/

  8. 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.

See All (500)

Ratings & Reviews

3.4
out of 5
5 Ratings

About

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.

Information

More From Cambridge University

You Might Also Like