Professor Campbell McLachlan KC had an illustrious career in professional practice before returning to academia in 2003. After joining Trinity Hall as Visiting Fellow in 2022, he has come back to College as a teaching Fellow and has recently published a new book.
How does it feel being back at Trinity Hall?
It feels great to be back. Before joining Trinity Hall as Visiting Fellow, I didn’t have a prior connection to the College. When I was awarded the Arthur Goodhart Visiting Chair in Legal Science, which is a faculty appointment, I was considering which colleges I should approach. I came to visit Trinity Hall without knowing much but what struck me immediately was how friendly everyone was from the moment I arrived. The first person I ran into, apart from the Porters, was Law Fellow Dr Rachel Tolley who greeted me and said: “We’ve been waiting to see you”, because my Visiting Fellowship was delayed as a result of the pandemic. I found it very easy to get to know people and I really liked the size of the fellowship. There’s such a strong fellowship community at Trinity Hall and a real strength and depth across the whole field of law, from criminal and public to commercial and private, and now me in international law. The staff are welcoming and helpful, and it’s a particularly beautiful college as well. It was clear to me that Trinity Hall was my first choice.
What value does the academic study of law bring to law practitioners?
I believe passionately in the value of studying law as an academic discipline. It is a fabulous thing to study. It has its own way of seeing the world and it’s a discrete discipline. If we take conflict of laws as an example, I’ve found it’s almost impossible to analyse problems effectively in practice unless you have studied conflict of laws as an academic subject because it’s a whole different way of seeing the law. Most study assumes that the problem is purely domestic until you consider conflict of laws, which opens you up to the legal systems of other countries and how their citizens relate to them. That really matters in practice. If I think back to my own experience in my former career as a partner in Herbert Smith, a large proportion of the work I was involved in had a cross[1]border element. Studying the conflict of laws as an academic discipline gives you a structure for how to actually do that problem-solving, which is very hard to retrofit. The academic study of law is immensely valuable, and immensely interesting because it covers the whole spectrum of human endeavour.
What inspired you to write your new book, The Principle of Systemic Integration in International Law?
I have a history with the topic that has held my interest for some time. Not long after I decided to become a full-time academic, after my previous practicing career, I worked with a Senior New Zealand diplomat, who was a member of the International Law Commission, on this very topic as there was little written about it at the time. Our work achieved quite a lot of prominence and I published it as an article, which is still one of the top two most cited articles in the International Comparative Law Quarterly, but I never did anything else with it. So when I had a sabbatical I wanted to look at what impact this so-called ‘principle of system integration’ had in practice. I rapidly discovered that it was a much bigger and more challenging project than I initially thought. It had been taken up by a whole range of States and international tribunals contending with different contexts who were facing up to the question of how everything fits together in practical settings. For the book I had to think both theoretically ‘What does it mean to say international law is a legal system?’ and about the practical guidance.
Systemic integration matters now because it’s like the master key for working out how different agendas for the pursuit of different public goods by different States and different constituencies fit together, creating a meaningful set of obligations that you can realistically expect States to implement.
I can bring perspective both from practice and academia, and I’m very interested in doing work which is of deep theoretical landing and produces practical results. It’s an ambitious work.
How does your experience as a practicing lawyer complement your teaching?
I bring academic rigour to my teaching but I also bring insights from practice and examples of real situations that a student might encounter if they follow a career in law. The course I’m going to be offering on the LLM is International Dispute Resolution. It makes me think of John Collier, who I knew and was a great guy, as he offered a course called the Settlement of International Disputes, which isn’t a million miles away from what I’ll be doing. I’ll also be offering supervisions to only Trinity Hall students in both public and private international law so there will be an opportunity for real engagement with the undergraduates as well.
The College is still attracting the most able students, which is simply the key to everything.
This article was first published in Front Court autumn 2024.
