Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Speaker: Professor Morten Rasmussen, University of Copenhagen
Biography: Morten Rasmussen is Associate Professor at the SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen and a leading expert on the legal histories of European integration and the League of Nations. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on these topics. The most recent publication is a general history of early period of European Union Law from 1950 to 1993. He is currently co-editing a Cambridge Handbook of the League of Nations and international law.
Abstract: Professor Rasmussen will present on his forthcoming publication 'The History of European Union Law - Constitutional Practice, 1950 to 1993'. The formative period of EU law witnessed an intense struggle over the emergence of a constitutional practice. While the supranational institutions, including the European Commission, the European Court of Justice and the European Parliament, as well as EU law academics helped to develop and promote the constitutional practice, member state governments and judiciaries were generally reluctant to embrace it. The struggle resulted in an uneasy stalemate in which the constitutional practice was allowed to influence the doctrines, shape and functioning of the European legal order that now underpins the EU, but a majority of member state governments rejected European constitutionalism as the legitimating principle of the new EU formed on basis of the Treaty of Maastricht (1992). The lecture traces the struggle and accounts for eventual stalemate over the constitutional practice and the fragile and partial system of rule of law that exists in the EU today.
For more information see:
https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

Speaker: Professor Dirk Andreas Zetzsche (Professor of Financial Law, University of Luxembourg)
Abstract: Sustainability-oriented investors want to pay for impact, not compliance. We analyse the regulatory challenges and opportunities of impact investing. We find that advancing impact investing requires a departure from the EU Sustainable Finance Framework's (EUSFF) prevailing input-orientation and an adjustment of EU asset-management law towards an EU Impact Finance Framework.
In its current form, the EUSFF over-emphasises exclusion, using rule-based ex ante definitions of sustainable business (herein termed input). If a large share of global capital follows these rules, unsustainable firms’ capital costs will increase, furthering innovation of sustainable alternatives. However, the EUSFF alone cannot prevent global capital flows into unsustainable investments, and non-EU countries follow different approaches. Although the EUSFF encourages, in effect, the sale of unsustainable EU businesses to non-EU firms, its input orientation has not helped the planet: the same activities continue elsewhere, often under weaker environmental and social standards, leaving the planet worse off. Further, the EUSFF’s disregard for proven ex post impacts risks large-scale capital misallocation and “impact washing”. Worse, the input focus comes at the cost of investments paired with audited evidence of positive ESG impacts ex post.
We argue for shifting EU financial regulation from input to (proven) impact. Yet, rather than adding a new product category, we propose recognising positive impacts through five fine-tuned steps that simplify EU financial regulation, taking into account regulatory developments in the United Kingdom and Switzerland. These include abolishing the link between “do no significant harm” under the Taxonomy Regulation and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, simplified reporting aligned with product materials and the emerging IFRS Disclosure Standards, introducing a new proportionality threshold for mid-sized AIFMs, and revising ESMA’s rules on fund names.
Professor Zetzsche is Professor of Financial Law at the University of Luxembourg where he has held the ADA Chair in Financial Law (inclusive finance) since March 2016 and functions as the Head of the Department of Law since 2024. He is also coordinator of the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance's House of Sustainable Governance & Markets and Co-PI of the Future FinTech National Centre of Excellence in Research and Innovation.
Professor Zetzsche has published more than 400 publications on inclusive and sustainable finance, corporate governance, FinTech and RegTech, and collective investment schemes. He has spoken at most of the leading universities globally and has advised many of the major regulators, eg the FSB, the BIS, the Basel Committee, the European Commission, the European Parliament, ESMA, EBA, the ESRB and the US SEC. In February 2023, he made the case for financial inclusion at the United Nations Social Commission, and spoke on inclusive and sustainable finance at COP27, 28, 29 and 30.
Professor Zetzsche's paper Towards an EU Impact Investing Framework is available on SSRN.
3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith 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/

Speaker: Prof Tamsin Paige, Deakin Law School
Lecture summary: Stories serve an integral role in society as, among other things, a meaning making tool. As a method of meaning making, stories are relational and allow the storyteller to assist their audience in understanding ideas, concepts, and experiences that lie beyond their lived experiences. Using this understanding and starting point, I ask what happens if we read international law as an iterative archive of stories about global society? I will start by exploring the meaning making function that storytelling serves in society, and then consider how international law, be it treaties, custom, case law or other legal instruments, can be read as official stories of the society that produced them.
Tamsin Phillipa Paige is an Associate Professor with Deakin Law School. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature, using qualitative sociological methods to analyse international law (with a focus on application of law and the impact it has on society). She also does law and literature research using popular fiction to understand social perceptions of the law. Her work has examined (among other things) Somali piracy, UN Security Council decision making, the impact of international law on queer lives, and conflict based sexual violence. In a former life, she was a French trained, fine dining pâtissière.
Chair: Dr Lena Holzer, Centre Fellow
This lecture was delivered on 20 February 2026 and is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series.

Speaker: Professor Halvard Haukeland Fredriksen, UIB, Norway
Biography: Halvard Haukeland Fredriksen is professor of European law at the University of Bergen, Norway. Besides his Norwegian law degree, he holds the degrees of Mag.Jur. and Dr.Jur. from the University of Göttingen (Germany) as well as a PhD from the University of Bergen. Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Co-Director of the Bergen Centre of the Europeanization of Norwegian law. Editor-in-chief of the Norwegian Law Journal. Member of the 2022-2024 ‘EEA Review Committee’ that assed Norway’s current affiliation to the European Union.
Abstract: For more than three decades, the Agreement on the European Economic Area (EEA) has integrated Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway into the better part of the EU internal market. Over the years, the Agreement has been supplemented by numerous other agreements between Norway and the EU, creating a complex patchwork of agreements commonly referred to as ‘the Norway model’. Notwithstanding the model’s democratic problems, the general view in Norway is that it has worked well as a compromise between those in favour of membership of the Union and those very much opposed to this idea. However, the EU’s strive for ‘strategic autonomy’ in the current geopolitical situation makes it more complicated to remain part of the internal market without being part of the customs union and the common commercial policy. The seminar will discuss the legal challenges confronting ‘the Norway model’ as well as possible remedies.
For more information see:
https://www.cels.law.cam.ac.uk/weekly-seminar-series

Speaker: Dr Penelope Ridings, International Law Commission
Lecture summary: In the last several decades, scholarly views of due diligence in international law have shifted from due diligence as a primary obligation under customary international law, to due diligence as a standard of conduct attached to a primary obligation. Thus, for example, due diligence is required to meet a State’s obligation of protection (of the environment) or of prevention (of genocide). The International Court of Justice in its Advisory Opinion on Climate Change adopted such an articulation and stated that due diligence is a standard of conduct and States have a duty to prevent significant harm to the environment by acting with due diligence. The Court not only reinforced the importance of the customary international law obligation not to cause significant harm to the environment but placed this within the ‘no harm’ principle, as expressed in the Corfu Channel case. However, the Court did not expressly articulate whether there was a broader obligation of due diligence that applies not only to the prevention of environmental harm, but also to the prevention of other harms to the rights and interests of States. Due diligence is thus as a crossroads. Has the ICJ essentially sought to bridge the gap between on the one hand the notion of due diligence as an obligation on a State not to permit activities subject to its jurisdiction or control which causes harm to the rights and interests of other States, and on the other hand the notion of due diligence as a standard of conduct attached to a primary obligation? Has the Court opened the door to finding a general customary international law obligation not to cause harm to the rights and interests of other States? Or has it confined due diligence to its status as a standard of conduct attached to a primary obligation? This lecture will discuss this pivotal point which is central to the elucidation of the foundation and scope of the due diligence obligation under international law.
Dr Penelope Ridings is a Member of the International Law Commission and New Zealand Barrister practising in the field of public international law. In 2025 she was appointed the ILC Special Rapporteur for the topic ‘Due Diligence in International Law’. She was formerly New Zealand’s Chief International Legal Adviser in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and a New Zealand diplomat. She was Agent for New Zealand before the International Court of Justice in Whaling in the Antarctic: Australia v Japan, New Zealand Intervening and before the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea in the Request for an Advisory Opinion submitted by the Sub-Regional Fisheries Commission.
After moving to the New Zealand Bar, she has advised governments and international organisations on public international law including law of the sea, fisheries, environmental law, trade and investment, international security and international dispute settlement. She was Chair of the 2025 arbitration under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (UK-Sandeel) and Chair of the WTO appeal arbitration China – Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights under the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement. She has served on several ICSID ad hoc Annulment Committees, including as Chair, and as an independent panellist in disputes before the WTO. She has lectured in international law and contributed to several books and written articles on various aspects of international law.
This lecture was delivered on 13 February 2026 and is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series.