Frederic Megret

Frédéric Mégret is the James S. Carpentier Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and a Full Professor as well as the holder of the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law at the Faculty of Law, McGill University. He is a senior fellow at the University of Melbourne, and a visiting Professor at Sciences Po Paris.

Previously he was a McGill University William Dawson Scholar from 2015 to 2023, and the holder of the Canada Research Chair on the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism from 2006 to 2015. From 2021 to 2024 he co-directed the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism.

In November 2022, Mégret received an honorary doctorate from the University of Copenhagen in recognition of his work in international law and has been a permanent visiting professor with the faculty’s Mobile research project on global mobility law since.

Mégret will soon be publishing a book on The New Interference in Sovereign Affairs and the Politics of International Law (Brill). He is currently co-authoring a book on Diasporas and the Making of Transnational Law with Larissa van den Herik (Leiden University). He is the co-editor with Vincent Chapaux and Usha Natarajan of The Routledge Handbook on International Law and Anthropocentrism (Routledge, 2023); with Philip Alston of The United Nations and Human Rights: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2020); with Immi Tallgren of The Dawn of a Discipline: International Criminal Justice and its Early Exponents (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and, with Kevin Jon Heller, Sarah Nouwen, Jens David Ohlin and Darryl Robinson of The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Mégret was previously an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto, a Boulton fellow at McGill University and a research associate at the European University Institute in Florence.

Professor Mégret’s scholarship has appeared in the European Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law, the Modern Law Review, the Leiden Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Human Rights Quarterly, the International Journal of Human Rights, the Human Rights Law Review, the Melbourne Journal of International Law, Transnational Legal Theory, Global Constitutionalism, the Canadian Yearbook of International Law, the Revue Québécoise de droit international, the Revue belge de droit international, Humanity, the London Review of International Law, the International Journal of Transitional Justice, Global Governance, the Harvard Human Rights Law Journal, the Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law, the British Yearbook of International Law, the International Organizations Law Review, and the McGill Law Journal, among others.

Mégret's interests lie in international criminal justice, international human rights law, international humanitarian law, the law of international organizations, transitional justice, criminal law, and general international law, and their intersections. He has a long-term interest in developing theories about the nature and history of international criminal justice. His work on international human rights is more explicitly critical in nature, seeking to uncover what lies behind the project of simultaneously internationalizing and legalizing human rights. He is keen on “re-imagining” the laws of war with a view to prodding some of the limits of the humanitarian tradition from the point of view of the jus contra bellum and pacifism.

In addition, Mégret is interested in (i) the role and status of the state in international law, (ii) the responsibility and accountability of international organizations, notably in peacekeeping environments, (iii) migrations, the protection of nationals/foreigners, and diasporas, and (iv) the theory of civil disobedience in international law.