M Sornarajah LLB (Ceylon), LLM (Yale), LLM, PhD, LLD (London) is a crucial figure in progressive approaches to international law, a lion in the field of international economic law and an originator of the field of the international law of foreign investment.
He is the CJ Koh Professor at the Faculty of Law of the National University of Singapore and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Human Rights, London School of Economics. He was the Tunku Abdul Rahman Professor of International Law at the University of Malaya at Kuala Lumpur. He was Head of the Law School of the University of Tasmania, Australia. He studied law at the University of Ceylon, the London School of Economics, King’s College, London and the Yale Law School. He was Research Fellow at the Centre for International Law, Cambridge and at the Max Planck Institut fur Offentliches Auslandisches Recht at Heidelburg, Germany. He was Visiting Professor at the Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto (where he delivered the Genest Distinguished Lecture), Carleton University, Ottawa (where he delivered the Simon Reisman Lecture), the University of Malaya (where he delivered the Tun Suffian Lecture), the Centre for Petroleum and Natural Resources Law at the University of Dundee, Scotland, American University at Washington DC; the World Trade Institute of the Universities of Berne and Neuchatel, Switzerland, Kyushu University, Japan, the Xiamen Academy of International Law, China, Xi’An Jiatao University, China, Beijing School of Transnational Law, China, Fundacio Gerulaitis Vargas Law School, Sao Paolo, Brazil and at the Georgetown Centre for Transnational Legal Studies, London. He lectured at the Supreme Court Judges Retreat at the National Judicial Institute, Bhopal, India.
He is the author of The Pursuit of Nationalized Property (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1986); International Commercial Arbitration (Longman, 1992); The Law of International Joint Ventures (Longman, 1994); The International Law on Foreign Investment (Cambridge University Press, 1996, 2nd ed., 2004, third edition 2010, fourth edition 2017), The Settlement of Foreign Investment Disputes (Kluwer, The Hague,2001), Resistance and Change in the International Law on Foreign Investment (Cambridge University Press, London, April,2015) and The Misery of International Law (with John Linarelli and Margot Salomon, Oxford University Press). He is joint editor of China, India and the International Economic Law (with Jiangyu Wang, Cambridge University Press,London, 2010 ); Good Faith in International Investment Law (with Andrew Mitchell and Tania Voon; Oxford University Press, 2015).
He was the Director of the UNCTAD/WTO Programme on Investment Treaties, Pretoria and New Delhi. He is a member of the Advisory Boards of the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, the Indian Journal of International Law and several other international journals. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Columbia Centre Sustainable Investment.
He is a Fellow of the Australian Centre for International Commercial Arbitration. He is on the Regional Panel of the Singapore International Arbitration Centre and the Kuala Lumpur Regional Arbitration Centre. He was a member of the Presidential Commission on Foreign Investment of Ecuador. He has been arbitrator, counsel or expert in several leading investment arbitrations. He has published extensively in the areas of public international law and international investment law. He is an Advocate of the Supreme Court of Ceylon, an Advocate and Solicitor of the High Court of Singapore and a Solicitor of the High Court of England and Wales. He is an Honorary Member of the Indian Society of International Law.
This wide-ranging and fascinating biographical interview with Professor Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah was conducted in April 2017 by Professors Antony Anghie and Sundhya Pahuja.
