COVID-19 and International Law: Sketching the Parameters

Abstract

This special issue of the Australian Year Book of International Law arises from a project started in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world. The project started as a series of short online essays grouped around the topic of COVID-19 and international law, the bulk of which were written between April and August 2020. In some ways, these essays are no different from what we as international lawyers normally do-providing commentary on how international law relates to the different dimensions of situations unfolding around us. Yet these essays, written during school shut-downs, campus closure, border restrictions, rising global infection rates and ongoing uncertainty as to what would happen next, are also valuable reflections in a time of great crisis: fitting perhaps for a discipline famously critiqued by Hilary Charlesworth as one of crisis, rather than situated in the everyday.