Scholar of law Philippe Sands will give the LaFeber-Silbey Lecture in History on March 5 at 4:45 p.m. in Goldwin Smith G64. His lecture is titled “A World Without Law? Lessons from History and Literature, from Nuremberg to Pinochet and Beyond.”
The event is co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Department of Literatures in English/the Cornell Creative Writing Program in the College of Arts and Sciences and will be livestreamed.
“Sands is a remarkable figure, someone who has not only written very incisive accounts about how international legal norms came to be, but has also contributed to strengthening them in the last three decades,” said Nicholas Mulder, assistant professor of history and Milstein Faculty Fellow (A&S). “In our era of disintegration and unaccountability, the strong Enlightenment strain in his outlook is especially powerful: no individual, no state, and no human activity should be beyond the reach of universal principles of justice. As a public intellectual who ranges widely across history, politics and law and is a phenomenal writer, we are thrilled to welcome him to Cornell.”
The annual LaFeber-Silbey lecture honors Walter LaFeber and Joel Silbey, two towering figures in American foreign relations and political history. Both taught at Cornell for many years.
“Given the major and ongoing upheavals taking place in international relations, it was important to us to select a speaker who could shed light on our current moment and its many contradictions and complexities,” said Ruth Lawlor, assistant professor of history (A&S). “As the preeminent international lawyer in the world today, someone who has done more than anyone else to shape the direction of international criminal law over the past fifty years, Philippe Sands is uniquely well-suited to comment on the historical and political significance of our times. We hope that his wealth of experience will allow him to shed some light on a future that currently seems very uncertain to many of us.”
Sands is Professor of Law at University College London and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard. He is a practicing barrister at the firm 11KBW, appears as counsel before the International Court of Justice and other international courts and tribunals, and sits as an international arbitrator.
Sands’ experience spans the genocides of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, the torture case against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the de-colonization of the Chagos Islands from Britain, crimes of aggression committed by Russia in Ukraine and, most recently, Palestinian self-determination, Lawlor notes.
His books include East West Street: On the Origins of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide (2016), The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive (2020) and The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy (2022). His work has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Sands’ latest book, “38 Londres Street: On Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia,” was published in April 2025.
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