Professor Saskia Sassen delivers Third Annual T.M.C. Asser Lecture, Den Haag

Registration is now closed as we have reached the maximum seating capacity. Should you still be interested, please send an e-mail to TMCAsserLecture@asser.nl and your name will be placed on a waiting list.

Each year the Asser Institute invites an internationally renowned jurist and outstanding public intellectual to take inspiration from Tobias Asser’s idea of cultivating trust and respect through law and legal institutions.

Cultivation of Trust

Mutual trust and respect are crucial to the health of any society, especially when it is a heterogeneous one; this holds regardless of whether it is the international society, the European society or the urban society of one of the rapidly growing cities across the globe. A question that Tobias Asser handed down to us is ‘how can law and legal institutions contribute to the cultivation of such necessary trust and respect?’ - a question central to the Asser Institute’s Research Agenda. The Annual T.M.C. Asser Lecture means to bring this question to different contexts and fields of law. It aspires to be a platform for constructive, critical reflection on the role of law in addressing the challenges and (potentially radical) changes of the global society in the 21st century, due to, for example, migration, globalisation and climate change.

Keynote speaker: Professor Saskia Sassen

We are honoured that Professor Saskia Sassen will deliver the lecture entitled:

When the Law cannot recognise Extreme Injustice even if it affects Millions

Professor Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and one of the world’s most prominent scholars on global cities, immigration, and states in the world economy. Inequality, gendering, digitisation and the implications of economic globalisation for nation-states and international law are key variables in her work. She is the author and co-editor of numerous books that have been published in over twenty languages. Her latest book is ‘Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy’ (Dutch publication by ACCO). For her work, Sassen has received various awards and honours. Most recently, she was made a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of the Sciences of the Netherlands.

Refugees of ‘economic development’

Her lecture will deal with an emergent type of migrant not formally recognised in law: a refugee not of war, but from particular forms of “economic development” that not only cause environmental destruction, but also have expelled millions of rural smallholders from their land over the last few years. She will elaborate on the need for a new legal regime that recognises this development.

When: 30 November 2017 from 16.00 - 17.30 hrs, followed by a reception. Registration opens at 15.15 with coffee and tea.

Where: Academy Hall of the Peace Palace, The Hague

For enquiries, please contact TMCAsserLecture@asser.nl.