Speaker: Professor Kathryn McNeilly (QUB)

Chair: Professor Kieran McEvoy (QUB)

In recent decades, the humanities and social sciences have experienced a 'temporal turn'.  Against this backdrop, and its influence on legal studies, attention to temporality is starting to develop within international law.  Institutions such as international courts and tribunals and the United Nations have emerged as an important site of investigation.  However, in this work focus has been placed on the salience of specific temporal concepts, time-related procedural rules, or the temporal nature of individual areas of institutional activity.  Scholarship has not yet extended to consider what I advance as a crucial aspect of time in international legal bodies: its institutionalisation.  This refers to time's manifestation as a structural phenomenon that is of significance in institutional settings.  Drawing resources from political science and international relations, this paper presents the concept of 'institutional time' as enabling study of this phenomenon.  This concept reveals how time shapes the creation, operation and evolution of law's bodies and, from this, their identity and contribution to the legal system they are located within.

Professor Kathryn McNeilly

Kathryn McNeilly is Professor of Law at Queen’s University Belfast and a Fellow and Sabbatical Fellow at the Mitchell Institute.  Her research expertise intersects public international law, international human rights law and international legal theory. She has recently led development of an emerging body of scholarship on the connectivity between time and international human rights law.  This work has been funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and includes co-editorship of the edited collection The Times and Temporalities of International Human Rights Law (Hart, 2022).

Professor Kieran McEvoy

Professor Kieran McEvoy is the Senator George J. Mitchell Chair in Peace, Security and Justice at the Mitchell Institute.  He is currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (September 2023-Sept 2026) working on the role of apologies and acknowledgement in addressing past violence and human rights abuses.