Biography

What if the law itself is the ultimate form of illegality? Rules shape everything: what you wear, what you eat, the planes you fly in. Thousands of people must cooperate under shared rules for any of this to work. We rely on these norms to produce a coherent whole, like a machine that takes behaviour as input and returns a verdict: legal or illegal. This engine runs on binary code, classifying the world into dualities: public and private, sovereign and subject, land and sea, crime and punishment, war and peace. But sometimes it produces a result that cannot be traced back to its own logic. A conclusion that breaks free from the premises on which it was built. I research these moments of rupture, where international law loops back on itself, contradicts its own foundations, and escapes the very rules it claims to impose. From oil investment contracts in the 1960s Middle East, to the fallout of 9/11 in humanitarian law; from Japanese control of the South Pacific, to the race for wealth in outer space, I trace these paradoxes. I search for a theory of law that insists on negating itself. Neither positivism nor structuralism can quite explain them. But thinkers like Hegel, Žižek, and Badiou might have seen it coming. These contradictions are not exceptions, I think. They are what happens when positive law reaches its limit. And so, I wonder — what remains?

Previous Education

Queen Mary, University of London International Disputes 2020
Amazon Federal University Law 2018