The Individual in the Law and Practice of the International Court of Justice

Chair: Dr Chris McQuade, City St George’s

The International Law and Affairs Group is delighted to welcome Dr Yusra Suedi, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Manchester, to discuss her most recent book entitled ‘The Individual in the Law and Practice of the International Court of Justice’. We will also welcome Massimo Lando (Fietta LLP) and City Law School’s own Jessica Corsi as discussants. Please join us for what promises to be an insightful and engaging discussion of Yusra’s work.

Book synopsis

The World Court's exclusive resolution of inter-state disputes has become one of the cornerstones of its identity. This insightful critique challenges the implication that individuals have little importance in such disputes as a result, revealing their relevance in a myriad of disputes beyond those centered on violations of multilateral human rights treaties.

Arguing for individuals' enhanced integration, it unveils a multitude of procedural practices with unquenched potential. It also carefully unpacks the Court's legal reasoning antithetical to individuals' critical relevance in traditionally state-centric territorial or maritime disputes, amongst others.

Critically analysing and evaluating the legal and political underpinnings for the Court's approaches and state litigants' choices from a lens of social idealism, this pioneering study sheds light on the imbalance between individuals as key stakeholders in inter-state disputes and the degree to which they are treated as such in law and practice.

About the Author

Yusra Suedi is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Law at the University of Manchester, where she serves as Director of the LLM programmes in International Law. She is also Visiting Professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Before joining the University of Manchester, she worked at the London School of Economics (LSE). She holds a PhD in Public International Law from the University of Geneva.

Yusra is a generalist in teaching and researching in multiple areas of international law. She is is the author of The Individual in the Law and Practice of the International Court of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Her work has been published in journals such as The Law and Practice of International Courts and Tribunals and the Leiden Journal of International Law.

Yusra actively practices international law. She has worked for the United Nations Office in Geneva, the International Law Commission, the Institut Du Droit International, the International Labour Organization Administrative Tribunal and the International Court of Justice. She has acted in cases on Palestine and climate change before the International Court of Justice, and has been involved in proceedings before the International Criminal Court, the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights and in investor-state arbitration before the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

Yusra is the founder of SAIL (Simplified Approach to International Law), a blog that breaks down the international law behind world events in plain language.

Discussants

Massimo Lando

Massimo Lando is a scholar and practitioner of public international law. He currently works at Fietta LLP, and previously was in full-time academia at the University of Hong Kong and an Associate Legal Officer at the International Court of Justice.

His research is in general international law, with an emphasis on dispute settlement, sources, and the law of the sea.

Dr. Jessica Lynn Corsi

Dr. Jessica Lynn Corsi is a Senior Lecturer in Law at The City Law School and a founding faculty member at City's interdisciplinary Violence and Society where she is a Co-Investigator on VISION, a 5 year £7.1 million multi-institution consortium grant from the UKPRP.

Dr. Corsi's work focuses on how the law can prevent and alleviate violence and foster substantive and transformative equality. Her approach spans public international, regional, domestic, and comparative law, and combines theory, data, traditional legal research methods, and interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research methods from the social sciences and the sciences.

Her current research projects include serving as Co-Founder of the Working Group on Gender Parity for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and related research outputs regarding changing the over representation of one gender on the International Court of Justice; serving as first author for two linked novel narrative systematic reviews on the gendered dimensions of homicide defences globally; and developing a novel research framework for conducting evidence synthesis on legal materials.