Professor Mark A. Drumbl, the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law and Director of the Transnational Law Institute, spent a half-year research sabbatical in Fall 2010 in Australia. His wife, Associate Clinical Professor of Law Michelle Drumbl, who also serves as Director of the Tax Law Clinic, and their two young sons accompanied Professor Drumbl for the semester. Michelle took advantage of her time away to finalize her forthcoming federal income tax supplemental casebook, under contract with Lexis/Nexis, and participate in the tax law discussion group at Melbourne Law School.
They divided their time between Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra. Mark was appointed Visiting Scholar and Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne Law School, where he also co-taught an intensive LLM international environmental law course; Parsons Visitor at the University of Sydney Law School; and Visiting Professor at the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University.
While in Australia, Mark worked extensively on his book Not So Simple: Child Soldiers, Justice, and the International Legal Imagination, which is under advance contract with Oxford University Press and slated for publication later this year. His book examines the challenges of reintegrating children who have been implicated in acts of mass atrocity. The project involves considerable use of ethnographic and quantitative research, and suggests a variety of reforms to international law and human rights policy in light of that largely overlooked evidence. From Sydney he discussed his project as a guest on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s The Current. A longer audio presentation of the project, made earlier at a talk at the Yale Law School, is accessible here.
While in Australia, Mark presented his book project in a series of lectures held at the law schools at Melbourne, Sydney, Monash University, the Australian National University, and Bond University. He also delivered the keynote speech for the Melbourne Journal of International Law’s annual cocktail party evening, where he spoke about supermodel Naomi Campbell’s testimony at the Special Court for Sierra Leone’s prosecution of Charles Taylor on charges that included trade in blood diamonds. In addition, he gave a talk at Melbourne Law School about the 1946 Polish trial of Arthur Greiser, a Nazi leader in Poland — the first trial for the crime of aggression. This talk is scheduled to appear in an edited collection titled Untold Stories: Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials edited by faculty at the Melbourne Law School and likely to be published by Oxford University Press.
At the University of Sydney Law School, Mark delivered the keynote lecture, titled “International Criminal Justice: Accomplishments and Challenges,” for the Reimagining International Criminal Justice Conference.
He also finalized chapters for five different books. These address various aspects of international law and have published over the past half-year or are scheduled for forthcoming publication:
The Law of Genocide, in Research Handbook On International Criminal Law (E Elger: Brown, ed. 2011)
He also drafted a contribution entitled Child Soldiers, Transitional Justice, and the Architecture of Post Bellum Settlements for a proposed collection, under the editorship of philosopher Larry May, on the “law after war” to be submitted to Cambridge University Press.
With all of this, the family still had a chance to visit many sites, including the Great Barrier Reef, far northern Queensland’s rainforests, New Zealand, Tasmania, the Great Ocean Road, and Victoria; they enjoyed many of the fabulous dining options in Australia, in particular the amazing South and East Asian food; and became fans of Australian Rules Football, the zoos, and the Socceroos.
