HLML2025: Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law: Continuing Conversations with Karen Knop - Session II - Gender and Feminism

Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures 2025: Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law: Continuing Conversations with Karen Knop

We will come together to celebrate the life and scholarship of our colleague and friend, Professor Karen Knop (1960-2022). Karen, until her untimely passing, was the Cecil A Wright Chair at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. A long-time friend of the Lauterpacht Centre, Karen was to have delivered the Centre’s 2025 Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures.

Session II Gender and Feminism

Professor Christine Chinkin in conversation with Dr Mai Taha

Chair: Professor Sandesh Sivakumaran

Professor Chinkin’s talk, 'Self-determination for women through three encounters' will explore three encounters with Karen's Knop's work that illustrate how self-determination remains illusory in many instances for women and their responses that challenge the structures of international law: discriminatory laws with respect to the nationality of married women; the Tokyo Women's Tribunal; and the Greenham Common women's peace camp.

Dr Taha’s talk, ‘Ways of Seeing: On the Gendering Work of Law and Violence’ will provide comments and reflections in engagement with Professor Chinkin’s talk, and Professor Knop’s writings.

Christine Chinkin, FBA, CMG is Emerita Professor of International Law at the LSE, Visiting Professorial Research Fellow at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security and Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan.

Mai Taha is Assistant Professor of Human Rights in the Department of Sociology at the LSE.