Secondment: Fairness and Law

This SEA-EU secondment at the Walther Schücking Institute for International Law (WSI) in Kiel embeds the secondee in the Max Planck Fellowship project “Fairness and International Law.” The project examines fairness as a regulative idea shaping interpretation, application, and progressive development of public international law—especially “across space and time” (toward distant others and future generations). Grounded in capability-based accounts of legitimate interests, it mobilizes interpretative tools such as evolutionary approach and normative integration across a range of topics: climate governance, human rights, resources/global commons, economic regulation, decolonisation, migration and digital regulation. This is a broad opportunity for an early-career scholar to participate in stimulating scholarly exchanges, also explores pathways for collaboration and joint outputs. An early-career scholars’ workshop is also set to take place during the secondment period.

About us:

The Max Planck Law Fellow Group is headed by Andreas von Arnauld and brings together researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology under the direction of Anne Peters and Marie-Claire Foblets. Against the backdrop of a concept of fairness inspired by Amartya Sen’s and Martha Nussbaum’s capability approach, the project aims at a more inclusive interpretation of international law. In doing so, it focuses on questions which pose structural challenges to a traditionally territorialized and presentist law. Looking into fairness over time, it explores how to better address past wrongs or interests of future generations. Looking into fairness over space, it attempts to better integrate interests of persons or states in other world regions. Both research avenues will lead to a better understanding of international law’s potential to contribute to more fairness among persons, peoples, and states.