ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Shiri Krebs is a JSD Candidate at Stanford Law School, specializing in international criminal and humanitarian law. She was recently awarded the Christiana Shi Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship in International Studies, and was also named the Zukerman Fellow, and Law and International Security Predoctoral Fellow at Stanford Center on International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Her doctoral dissertation focuses on war crimes investigations and fact-finding during armed conflicts. This interdisciplinary research project combines theories and methods from law, psychology, sociology and political science, including online survey experiments.

From 2005 to 2010 Shiri served as legal advisor on international law matters in the Chief-Justice's chambers, the Israeli Supreme Court. During that time she has taught public international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a teaching assistantship which granted her the Dean's award for excellent junior faculty members, as well as 'best teacher' award. After leaving the Supreme Court, Shiri joined the Israeli Democracy Institute as a researcher, working on 'Terrorism and Democracy' projects, and publishing frequent op-eds in various newspapers and blogs.

In September 2010 Shiri started her graduate studies at Stanford Law School. Her Masters thesis - an empirical analysis of preventive detention cases - was presented in several international conferences and has won the Steven M. Block Civil Liberties Award. 

In 2012, while working on her dissertation, Shiri was appointed as a Teaching Scholar at Santa Clara University School of Law, teaching international criminal law and international humanitarian law. She is currently serving as a Teaching Assistant for CISAC's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: Key human rights instruments and leading scholars argue that minority language rights should be treated as human rights, both because language is constitutive of an individual’s cultural identity and because linguistic pluralism increases diversity. These treaties and academics assign the value of linguistic pluralism in diversity. But, this paper demonstrates, major human rights courts and quasi-judicial institutions are not, in fact, prepared to force states to swallow the dramatic costs entailed by a true diversity-protecting regime. Outside narrow exceptions or a path dependent national-political compromise, these enforcement bodies continuously allow the state to actively incentivize assimilation into the dominant culture and language of the majority. The minority can still maintain its distinct language, but only at its own cost. The slippage between the promise of rights and their actual interpretation carries some important political and economic benefits, but the resulting legal outcome does not provide the robust protection of diversity to which lip service is paid.  Importantly, the assimilationist nature of the jurisprudence is not indifferent to human rights. However, instead of advancing maximal linguistic diversity as a preeminent norm, the regime that is applied by judicial bodies supports a different set of human rights, those protecting linguistic minorities from discrimination, and promoting equal access of the group to market and political institutions.  The result is a tension between two human rights values: pluralism and equality.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Moria Paz is a Law and International Security Fellow at CISAC. She was an affiliate at CISAC from February 2012-July 2013. Before joining CISAC, she was a Lecturer at Stanford Law School and the Teaching Fellow of the Stanford Program for International Legal Studies (SPILS). Her current research examines issues of state control and freedom of movement through the entry point of travel documents. Earlier work examined the intersection between minorities, language rights, and international law. Moria received her S.J.D. degree from Harvard Law School. While at Harvard, she was awarded a number of fellowships, including at the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations, The European Law Research Center, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

About the Topic: Re-establishing and strengthening the rule of international law in international affairs was a central Allied aim in the First World War. Revisionism in its many forms has erased this from our memory, and with it the meaning of the war. Imperial Germany’s actions and justifications for its war conduct amounted to proposing an entirely different set of international-legal principles from those that other European states recognized as public law. This talk examines what those principles were and what implications they had for the legal world order.

About the Speaker: Isabel V. Hull received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1978 and has since then been teaching at Cornell University, where she is the John Stambaugh Professor of History. A German historian, her work has reached backward to 1600 and forward to 1918 and has focused on the history of sexuality, the development of civil society, military culture, and imperial politics and governance. She has recently completed a book comparing Imperial Germany, Great Britain, and France during World War I and the impact of international law on their respective conduct of the war. It will appear in Spring 2014 under the title, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law in the First World War. Her talk is based on this latest research.