Anna Saunders

I am giving a talk in a week on “After Patent Republic” as part of the International Society for the History and Theory of IP @ishtip.bsky.social seminar series.

All welcome and you can register here (it’s online)

Does your university have a contract with Grammarly? Write to the decision-maker asking if they think the university should be paying for a tool that is fast integrating features that can only be used for academic misconduct and cognitive offloading and request they drop the contract.

Dollar dominance, de-dollarization, and international law Abstract. Recent proposals to seize Russian Central Bank assets expose how little international lawyers have engaged with the intensifying competition over

What does de-dollarisation mean in practice? How does it relate to global law and governance?

My article 'Dollar Dominance, De-Dollarization, and International Law' is now out in JIEL. I present dollar dominance and de-dollarisation as competing legal institutions.

academic.oup.com/jiel/advance...

In case you missed this in the summer haze, our Early-Career Paper Prize 2026 is now open.
Deadline: 15th December 2025.
Publication plus £1,000 for the Prize winner!

There's a lot going on in the world, so you may have missed the announcement that next week (6-8 October) the ICJ will hold oral hearings in the advisory proceedings on the right to strike. 20 states and 5 international organisations are due to participate.
www.icj-cij.org/sites/defaul...

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: After Patent Republic - Hyo Yoon Kang. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting. What comes after ‘Patent Republic’? In his 2006 article, Mario Biagioli showed how the modern U.S. patent law system, with its development of examination, filing, and institutional bureaucracy, was cl...

I'm giving a talk on "After Patent Republic?"
on 22 October, 3pm GMT, online,
in which I'll think about the role of patent law in non-democratic and authoritarian polities.

It's part of @ishtip.bsky.social's 2025-6 Seminar Series.

Everyone welcome.

Abstract and registration:

We know we haven’t been very active here, but rest assured we are active in real life!

Save the date for the LPE in Europe Summer Academy 2026: 10-12 June, University of Glasgow.

Call for applications will follow!

🚨 Conference Announcement 🚨

The Land Question
October 30-31, 2025
Grimm Zentrum, HU Berlin

Full Program + Abstracts now online. 2 days, 30 scholars, 8 panels. No registration required. Keynotes by Omar Dahbour and Isabel Feichtner. Come!

criticaltheoryinberlin.de/event/the-la...

wonderful, wish I could join you all

Poster of Gillian Rose: history, Marxism, and the Turn to Law. 3 December 2025, University of Warwick. With Jessica Feely, Will Spendlove, Tarik Kochi, Adrian Wilding, Chris O'kane, Nadia Bou Ali and the organiser, Rosie Woodhouse.

Gillian Rose's on law, history, and Marxism.
This should be an essential workshop with deep intellectual and theoretical engagement that is becoming rarer by the day in UK legal academia. Organised by the wonderful Rosie Woodhouse. Registration and more info here: warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/...

huge congratulations to you both! look forward to hearing more about the project

Defining Away Palestine

I wrote a short piece on definitions that conflate anti/semitism with (anti)-Zionism and the dangers that their adoption poses specifically for international lawyers, including for our Palestinian colleagues and students: voelkerrechtsblog.org/defining-awa...

🚨 ONLINE EVENT

Join us for a free panel on the war economy, the climate impacts of war & the geopolitics of the climate transition.

Speakers: @stephensemler.bsky.social, @triofrancos.bsky.social & @iliasalami.bsky.social, chaired by @lalehkhalili.bsky.social

📅 16 Oct 6PM BST
🔗 shorturl.at/NwJCL

Tonight’s Wheelwright Lecture. Raewyn Connell with a masterclass in dissecting three structural tensions producing university crises, and how to begin addressing each of them. The talk ended with Tagore’s university - as a meeting place of worlds, built collectively, under the trees.

RALLY TO SAVE MEANJIN

Thursday 11 Sep 9am
Outside the Melbourne University Publishing office, 715 Swanston St, Carlton.

A number of Australian writers and editors will speak in support of this vital cultural institution

Screenshot from event link.

It’s lovely to be in Canberra this month as a visiting fellow at the ANU Law School. On Thursday 18th September, I’ll be presenting some of the work from my new book which explores emotions and conflicts over LGBT rights. Come along if you’re around! Details here: law.anu.edu.au/news-and-eve... 🌈🎓

The Egg, a cricket trophy awarded to the winners of Overland vs Meanjin matches, alongside a copy of Jim Davidson's Emperor in Lilliput, the book about magazine founding editors Clem Christesen and Stephen Murray-Smith.

Since our very first issue Meanjin and Overland have been comrades, mates, rivals, and drinking buddies. The UMP board’s decision is a shockingly myopic act of cultural vandalism which will grievously harm the Australian literary community.

Call for Papers - Legal History in Asia and Beyond: Lessons from the Past for the Present

17-18 March (Hong Kong) & 23 March (Oxford) 2026 (participants can join in either location)

Deadline 31 October 2025

www.law.cuhk.edu.hk/app/events/c...

Trump just purported to abolish the Patent Office union on the grounds that the PTO is a national security agency

‘I’m not saying it’s not a tragedy’ says Jack Lew, while defending Israel’s killing of ‘children of Hamas fighters’. The language of tragedy has become the refuge of all those who want to obscure agency and responsibility, as if Palestinians are simply fated to die.

it’s a soggy Sydney sojourn

thrilled, delighted etc to be in Sydney this month for the most rain this city has seen since 1858. get in touch if you want to have coffee and know of somewhere dry

The AFLJ is looking for a Publication and Media Support Officer to assist with its copyediting, outreach and engagement activities! Are you a Melbourne-based graduate researcher with an interest in feminism and law? This position could be perfect for you! drive.google.com/file/d/16z3u...

Many progressives think Open Science is a good thing but it has an ambiguous stance re IP.

Here is @kathybowrey.bsky.social's critical intellectual property scholarship's angle on Open Science on @ishtip.bsky.social youtube page.

⬇️

Important, but probably under most people's radar:
The Inter American Court of Human Rights has issued an advisory opinion on care work, both paid and unpaid (currently only available in Spanish).
@minmaxsunt.bsky.social - this will be of interest to you, I think.

I have a new paper in History of Political Economy that is now available to read for free online. It's about what we can and can't learn from studying – and criticizing – economics using the methods of the history of science. read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article...

very much enjoyed speaking to the international law clinic at ANU today about paths for legal advocacy in relation to climate, including scientific and technological cooperation; geoengineering and the law; and remedies and structural reparations in the ICJ’s recent advisory opinion.

very much looking forward to convening this workshop with my colleague Wanshu Cong in just two short weeks - hopefully to lead to many more conversations on an international law for another technology.

law.anu.edu.au/news-and-eve...

Incredibly instructive reporting on what appears well on its way to becoming the biggest, most concentrated, most energy- and resource-intensive, and most speculative wave of capital investment ever.
ig.ft.com/ai-data-cent...

The loss of the school of sociology undermines decades of intellectual investment It would be a big loss for the ANU

On the deep and long-term consequences of cuts to Sociology at the ANU.

The work being done here, and the prospects for interdisciplinary research across the Colleges, played a big part in my decision to join the law school. Its loss impoverishes us all.

www.canberratimes.com.au/story/902804...