Georgetown Law

Georgetown Law professor Katrin Kuhlmann presents working paper at International Law Colloquium

The University of Georgia School of Law’s spring 2025 International Law Colloquium welcomed Professor Katrin Kuhlmann, who presented her working paper, “Micro International Law.” Greg Day, Associate Professor in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, served as Kuhlmann’s faculty discussant.

Kuhlmann is the Faculty Director and Co-founder of the Center on Inclusive Trade and Development at Georgetown Law. Her scholarly focus lies in international law, development, inclusive and sustainable international trade law, regional trade agreements, agricultural law and food security, comparative economic law, African trade and development law and corridors, and the interdisciplinary connections between law and development.

Below is an abstract of Kuhlmann’s working paper:

International law has long been viewed as the domain of countries and capitals, not fields or factories, but this overly top-down perspective misses a critical and under-studied part of the picture. Underneath the macro level of standardized legal norms, international law is much more nuanced, with multiple sites of influence, production, design, adoption, and decision-making that scholars have largely neglected but which need to be better understood. Models stemming from legal systems in less powerful states, smaller-scale stakeholder interests, and local solutions are often treated as one-off anecdotes or isolated case studies without broader implications.

Capturing these lessons, cataloging them, and building a methodology around them could be transformational at a time when international law needs a refresh to make it more responsive to a new set of global challenges ranging from inequality to food insecurity to climate change.

This paper presents a conceptual and methodological framework for “micro international law” as a sub-field of international law. Adding a micro dimension to international law would bring it in line with other disciplines that recognize the importance of studying smaller-scale, more granular interventions. It would also make a significant contribution to the international legal field by integrating theoretical and empirical approaches to focus on the impact innovations within domestic legal systems and the interests of individuals have on international law (and the impact of international law on these systems and stakeholders), ultimately providing a framework for designing international law differently to equitably address more specialized needs and positively impact the lives of those international law aims to serve and benefit.

This year, Professor Desirée LeClercq is overseeing the colloquium, which is designed to introduce students to features of international economic law through engagement with scholars in the international legal field. To view the full list of International Law Colloquium speakers, visit our website.

This program is made possible through the Kirbo Trust Endowed Faculty Enhancement Fund and the Talmadge Law Faculty Fund.

Georgetown Law Professor Cliff Sloan discusses “The Court at War” at Georgia Law

Georgetown Law Professor Cliff Sloan recently discussed his new book, The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made, in an event sponsored by the Dean Rusk International Law center here at the University of Georgia School of Law.

Sloan was joined in conversation by two of the law school’s professors: Nathan S. Chapman, Pope F. Brock Professor of Law; and Diane Marie Amann, who is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and the Center’s Faculty Co-Director.

Below is a description of the book:

By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices—the most by any president except George Washington—and handpicked the chief justice.

But the wartime Roosevelt Court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president.

The Court at War explores this pivotal period. It provides a cast of unforgettable characters in the justices—from the mercurial, Vienna-born intellectual Felix Frankfurter to the Alabama populist Hugo Black; from the western prodigy William O. Douglas, FDR’s initial pick to be his running mate in 1944, to Roosevelt’s former attorney general and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson.

The justices’ shameless capitulation and unwillingness to cross their beloved president highlight the dangers of an unseemly closeness between Supreme Court justices and their political patrons. But the FDR Court’s finest moments also provided a robust defense of individual rights, rights the current Court has put in jeopardy. Sloan’s intimate portrait is a vivid, instructive tale for modern times.

Sloan joined Georgetown – where he teaches constitutional law, criminal justice, and death penalty litigation – following a distinguished legal career, in all three branches of the federal government, at leading law firms, and in-house at the Washington Post.  He is also the author of The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court, a 2009 history of the Court’s foundational decision in Marbury v. Madison.