Registration ends on 12.10.2026 at 23:59.

This course explores the relationship between international law and sustainability through a question that runs through every session: as sustainability reshapes international law, is it giving rise to a new legal imaginary, a shared understanding of the world, the purposes of international law, and the forms of legal intervention considered possible and legitimate, and can such an imaginary do real legal work?
It begins with sustainable development and its transformation from a political idea into a concept of legal significance, from the Stockholm Conference to the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals and their reception by courts and tribunals. Particular attention is paid to sustainable development as a compromise capable of reconciling interests of the Global North and South without resolving the tensions between them. This development also raises a more fundamental question about how law is made and named: through the distinction between rules and principles and the deliberate choice of language in legal texts, the course examines why some normative ideas acquire legal force while others remain aspirational.
The course then turns to the three branches of international law central to sustainability, namely environmental, human rights, and economic law. Each rests on a different legal imaginary, reflecting different understandings of what law should protect, how states, individuals, markets, and the environment relate to one another, and how law can shape behaviour and produce change. The course examines what each field contributes to sustainability governance, where its limits lie, and whether these fragmented legal worlds can genuinely be brought together. Mechanisms of integration, in particular systemic integration under Article 31(3)(c) VCLT, provide a testing ground for whether interpretation can reconcile competing regimes or ultimately leaves unresolved the question of which regime prevails.
Having tested the law as it stands, the course asks whether a more transformative sustainability imaginary is taking legal form. Recent advisory opinions of the ICJ, ITLOS, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, together with other instruments are examined for signs that environmental, human rights, and economic concerns are increasingly being understood together rather than apart. The course then turns to pathfinder agreements such as ACCTS and the BBNJ Agreement, where sustainability is translated into concrete legal norms and institutional arrangements. It concludes with de-fossilisation as a test case for what international sustainability law, and the emerging imaginary underpinning it, can actually achieve, and where further legal development is needed to realise its transformative potential.

The course moves from a foundational grounding to the ability to critically examine the contemporary relationship between international law and sustainability and the legal governance surrounding it. Students develop an analytical perspective on the three branches of international sustainability law and on the interpretive techniques used to reconcile their competing obligations, alongside a critical appreciation of how sustainability is generating new legal imaginaries and how those imaginaries harden into norms, find their way into treaty texts and jurisprudence, and are tested in practice. The aim is to equip students both to interpret the law as it stands and to think rigorously about the law as it is becoming.

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