Extended biography: Sir Christopher John Greenwood

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In November 2021 and February 2022 I was able to interview Sir Christopher John Greenwood, GBE, CMG, QC on three occasions at his home in Girton, and at the Master's Lodge in Magdalene College, Cambridge. The much-honoured international lawyer was the fifth of our Eminent Scholars to have sat on the bench of the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Two somewhat paradoxical strands showed up from his interviews that were formed early in his life, well before he entered the legal profession, and which interwove to characterise his illustrious and distinctive career: his embracing of internationalism and world affairs; and his affinity with a compact, well-ordered and studious collegiate milieu.

Early life and student days (1955-1977)

As to the first of these traits, his origins in a parochial environment provided the unlikely momentum. Christopher John Greenwood was born in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire on 12^th May 1955. At that time it was a small market town with "no ethnic diversity whatsoever" (Q8), as the London overspill plan, which rapidly transformed the character of the town in the early 60s had not yet begun. Being just about as far from the sea as it possible to get in England, Wellingborough in the late 50s was the epitome of post-war, small-town rural England. It was Christopher's translocation from this tranquil, somewhat insular setting, to a cosmopolitan melting pot in the tropics that was one of the transformational moments of his life. It coloured his world view and beckoned him onto the road towards studying international law: "growing up in Singapore you came across international law quite a lot; there were the boundary disputes with Malaysia; the break-up of the Federation and things like that.The Vietnam War was going on." (Q40).

Christopher's first years were spent in Wellingborough, looked after mainly by his mother Diana, a PE teacher, while his father Murray was mostly away at sea in the Merchant Navy. Circumstances in late 50s England were unsettled (the Suez Crisis occurred the year after Christopher was born), and the country was still adjusting to the vast social and economic changes brought about by the war and Britain's uncertain role in the new world order. When he was six (1961) the family moved to Singapore, where his father became a harbour pilot in the Port of Singapore Authority as Singapore rapidly developed its commercial potential. As a result, the Greenwoods became members of a large ex-pat community involved in activities related to the port commerce, and all were employed on a variety of fixed-term contracts.

By then, although still technically a Crown Colony, Singapore was effectively self-governing[1], and it became part of the Malaysian Federation when the latter gained independence in 1963, and a fully independent island state in 1965.

Thus at the age of six, Christopher was catapulted from a landlocked, parochial environment to what he remembers as "an extraordinarily vibrant and diverse community..." (Q8). He vividly described the transformation in his outlook on the world when the kaleidoscope of cultures unfolded before him in the streets the morning after the family had arrived at the Station Hotel in Singapore. He walked out into town on his own, exploring this strange new world, without his mother's permission, and in his interview recalled clearly his discovery of the "extraordinary smells and colours, and the excitement of life there." Even sixty years later, he reminisced that "..It was just a wonderfully exciting place to grow up." (Q8). It should also not be forgotten that the climate only one degree north of the Equator, was in complete contrast to what he would have been used to in the English Midlands.

These experiences in the Cross-Roads of the Far East, made an indelible impression upon him. So much so, that later in life, Sir Christopher Greenwood, the International Lawyer par excellence, gave his relatively short stay in Singapore, as one of the factors that influenced his choice of International Law as a subject to study for his LLB fifteen years later at Cambridge (see Q40).

Christopher's education had begun briefly at a primary school in Wellingborough before the family decamped to Singapore, but once in the Far East he had the good fortune to attend the Port Authority's private Raeburn School run for the children of the expats. This he described as a "wonderful school....one of the best places I've ever been to." (Q3). He was fortunate that his time coincided with the tenure of the "wonderful headmistress", Lady Muriel Mackay[2], who taught with the "firm policy" that her charges had to reach an advanced standard that would give them a term's leeway to wherever they returned when their parents' contracts came to an end. Christopher was a pupil at Raeburn Park for four years, and "thoroughly enjoyed it".

Having gained an expansive view of the world at such an early age, in 1965 Christopher was sent back to Wellingborough at the age of ten, where he lived with his grandmother while he grew up. His parents stayed in Singapore until the early 2000s.

He spent the next eight years as a day-boy at Wellingborough School, at a time when it was still predominantly a boarding school. This was one of the oldest schools in England (founded in Tudor times - 1595 - as a grammar school), where he was integrated back into a traditional English environment. After finishing his "O" levels, he studied history ("always been one of my passions and still is..." Q10), English, and Latin.

The latter subject was clearly influenced by a latent hope to study law after his school studies, and his subtle quip on the supposed use of this subject in this cause was amusing: "with hindsight I enjoyed studying Latin, but I .... was persuaded into it on the grounds that it would be useful to me as a lawyer. I can't say it has been terribly useful as a lawyer." (Q10)[3].

Although, rather surprisingly, Wellingborough did not have at the time "a particulerly strong Oxbridge connection: I was the only candidate who applied to either Oxford or Cambridge in my year...", he had "always.... wanted to go to Cambridge if I could because.....[of] this wonderful university with a tremendous global reputation..". Very tellingly, I thought, he "also very much liked the collegiate system..." (Q12).

His choice of Magdalene was strongly influenced by the school's headmaster, and ex-Magdalene man who persuaded Christopher that it "would be a great place to grow up.". Once he had experienced it, Christopher concluded that "...he was absolutely right." (Q12). The second die was cast.

For Chris Greenwood, Magdalene has been a lode star, which after all his stellar international wanderings via LSE, the Hague and ICJ, and innumerable tribunals and arbitrations, has brought him home as Master of his beloved college to usher in his retirement. We now need to explore his journey between these two points.

Once at Cambridge, Chris Greenwood found Magdalene College, with its riverside location "....the most exciting place to be in.There was a lot going on.Very friendly people, very strong sense of community, which I think the college still has..." (Q13). His sense of belonging to such a small, self-sufficient community was brought out in his remark apropos the wider town of Cambridge. "....I was more interested in life in the university and I didn't travel very much around the town.I can remember when I was a graduate student being invited to a dinner party in a house off Victoria Road and had to get out a map and find out where this was and it's all of about ten minutes' walk from Magdalene..." (Q15).

A large factor in this sense of belonging to a close community was the presence of the late Mr Mickey Dias [4], whom Chris recalled as his main mentor in those early days. "[H]e's probably the person I knew best, as an undergraduate, of the people teaching in the Faculty.He was Director of Studies at Magdalene.He'd interviewed me...and taken a real gamble in taking me because I'd rather made a mess of my ‘A' Levels. He was quite one of the best teachers I've ever come across...as a supervisor he was inspiring." (Q36).

A further warm anecdote of his remembrance of Mr Dias was his kindness and lack of formality. "[H]e was kindness itself....I'll give you two instances...I was President of the Union in the Lent term of my third year which meant that there was then quite a considerable amount of cramming to be done for part two when I finished. [He] asked me how things were going and I said I was having a bit of difficulty with some things.He took me over to his room and produced the proofs of his book on jurisprudence [5]. He said, "I've just finished correcting these, if these would be of any help to you take them away and have a look at them," which I thought was wonderfully kind and turned out to be extremely helpful.

The second thing is that at the end of the Lent term that year I got engaged.Every Easter term, the Saturday before the Tripos started, Mickey Dias used to host a dinner for all the lawyers in college, with the Master and a couple of Fellows and a guest speaker....[H]is lovely wife, Norah, used to hold a private dinner party at their house for the wives of the guest speaker, the Master and Fellows who were attending. The Diases invited my fiancée, who was a second year undergraduate, to go out to the house for the ladies' dinner that evening.Magdalene was still, of course, an all male college [6].She had a wonderful time. Again, I thought it was an example of a degree of kindness, a closeness, of human warmth which it's very rare to find in a university." (Q39). Such memories cemented Chris's impression as a friendly community, to which he was always loyal and drawn.

The recollection above referring to Chris Greenwood's Presidency of the Union (1976) was of an activity that loomed large in his undergraduate student days, although its legacy extended far beyond, into his legal career. Its origins lay in his days at Wellingborough School where he'd "enjoyed debating", but it was at Cambridge where he excelled: "...Union was the most marvelous place to be." (Q13).

To put this "excitement" into context Sir Christopher related that "It was a very political time, the early seventies....the Heath[7] government had collapsed; there were two general elections in 1974....and the undergraduate political scene was very much divided between the three main parties. I'd been politically active all through my teens and so this was a natural place to go and I enjoy debating.I found it was very exhilarating if it went well, very depressing if it went badly, but that's quite good experience for later on." (Q43).

Sir Christopher recalled how the cut and thrust of debating in the Union, and the self confidence it instilled in him, served him well in challenging court appearances, none more so than this arguing in the Pinochet case [8] before the House of Lords in the late 90s."The Pinochet case...brought home to me how much I owed to years of supervising here because it really was advocacy in the form of being cross-examined by five – and then the second time, seven – very distinguished Law Lords, so it was very helpful that I had that supervision training to fall back on.The other thing I can remember thinking when I got up to speak in the Pinochet case was that....you once followed Harold Macmillan[9] speaking in the Cambridge Union, you can do this.So it was very helpful to have that self confidence to fall back on."

The other aspect of his Cambridge experience referred to above, which is unique to the system of teaching in the Oxbridge collegiate milieu, was his honing of skills in responding to questions from quick-witted, probing students during supervisions. These also stood him in good stead in his legal practice where he "..was very conscious [of it] .....in some of my court work. If you appeared in the International Court you essentially were a lecturer, you read a speech, but if you appeared in the English courts it was like being a supervisor [of] students all over again, you get very active judges firing questions at you.It was an enormous help that I had been a supervisor of large numbers of students for nearly 20 years because I was used to being asked difficult questions by clever people; [also] I was used to asking difficult questions myself and I was able to draw on that as a barrister.I don't think people realise the extent to which life as an advocate has moved on from the days of the grand Ciceronian speech to much more of a dialogue with the court, not in international courts but in the courts in this country or in America, Australia or the other big common law jurisdictions.The supervision system is extremely good training for that because it teaches you how to react quickly to a question that's put to you, to a difficulty of any kind." (Q75).

College Teaching Officer, Magdalene College (1978-81)

These latter skills, which he had instinctively at his fingertips in later life, were learned after he graduated from Magdalene in 1977 with his LLB in international law. He took his Bar exams in 1978, and had at that juncture the intention of practicing as a barrister, but was deflected from this path by " ....a couple of things [that] were beginning to appear on the horizon.First of all, I was getting married and therefore a stable income was suddenly very attractive.Secondly, I'd done some teaching during my LLB year and rather more teaching because I was a part-time college lecturer during the year I did my Bar exams, and I very much enjoyed supervising.... so the possibility of coming back to Cambridge as a Fellow began to loom on the horizon." (Q45).

This was engineered by his mentor Mr Dias "....the circumstances were largely that Mickey Dias and Colin Colbert[10]...the two Law Fellows that Magdalene had at the time, were extremely kind in seeing that I would quite liked to stay.I had applied unsuccessfully for a job at Oxford a few months earlier and they persuaded the governing body [at Magdalene] to create a Fellowship, a CTO position [11] as it would be called today, which was a fixed term one to give me a chance to get a university post." (Q46). This transpired in 1978, and Chris Greenwood never looked back.

Career-wise, the major element in the development of Chris Greenwood's career was the cause of his decision to study international law. Interestingly, he did not do the undergraduate courses in the subject, which is why when asked about mentors and personalities during these years, international lawyers were not mentioned. For instance, Professor Clive Parry[12]: "I didn't come across Clive Parry as an undergraduate, but when I did the LLB in '76 to '77 he taught me and he was extremely kind to me at the personal level....I found him a really very inspiring teacher." (Q17); Philip Allott [13] "He taught me...for the LLB...European Union law, well, EEC law paper as it would have been, and also part of International Institutions" (Q22); and Derek Bowett [14] "I only came across him very indirectly as an undergraduate, because I didn't take any of the subjects he was lecturing in and he didn't supervise Magdalene students...I remember he used to host the Middle Temple events in Cambridge. [Chris had joined the Middle Temple in 1974]" (Q32).

So what had precipitated this change in emphasis, which clearly was a cross-roads in his life? "Well, I'd love to say that this was what I had always intended to do...[I]n a sense, I'd always been interested in international law [having grown up] up in Singapore...But for some reason I can never remember, I didn't study international law as an undergraduate; I took family law instead....[However] I decided I'd stay and do an LLB.I got the funding for that.So I looked around for which subjects were the most interesting and ....one day I got a phone call from my tutor who said, "If you do all international law we can get you a scholarship." So I did all international law papers....It's perhaps not the best reason for becoming an international lawyer, but I certainly thoroughly enjoyed it." (Q40-41). Sometimes contingency rescues one from one's own follies! It certainly did in Christopher Greenwood's case.

Lecturing at Cambridge (1981-96)

During his three years as a College Teaching Officer at Magdalene, Chris applied unsuccessfully for several vacant Assistant Lectureships, and at last was lucky. "....in those days if you were a CTO you applied for any assistant lectureship that came up.The Faculty appointed two new assistant lecturers about Easter of 1981 and I was lucky enough to be one of them.Barry Rider[15], I think, was the other." (Q48).

Once on the academic ladder, Chris Greenwood progressed upwards, and three years later was appointed lecturer (in 1984), after serving what he called was "akin to a probationary period..." (Q61), and extensively evolved his teaching, research, and practitioner's interest over the following twelve years.

Arguably, the main development during this period was his establishment as a specialist and authority on what could be called loosely the laws of armed conflict and related topics, for which he is now looked upon as a world authority. Examining the sources of these interests was one of the aspects that my interviews was designed to explore.

While he was Assistant Lecturer at the age of 28 years, his first two journal papers appeared, one of which, published in 1983, was his first sortie into legal aspects of armed conflicts [16]. This paper has turned out to be one of the centre-pieces in his thinking on the subject, which he included in his "Laws of War" essays 23 years later [17], even though it was written so early in his cogitating on the topic. He explained the circumstances of its writing in the early 80s, and how it epitomised the contingency to which we have already alluded.

"[It was] partly chance.When I was appointed as an Assistant Lecturer the Faculty wanted me to take up European Community law, which I was very happy to do, but part of the deal was that as I was being asked to get up a new subject from scratch. They would give me a subject that I had already studied and worked on, and the laws of war was a particularly attractive option.John Hopkins[18], who had covered that part of the course was interested in moving on to something else... It gave me a course all of my own....which was a wonderful vote of confidence from the Faculty but also a great opportunity for me as a young Assistant Lecturer." (Q50).

On this first seminal paper, Sir Christopher pointed out that it had been written well before it appeared in print, and under somewhat trying circumstances. The thinking behind it " ...I had when I was writing my first set of lectures on the laws of war course, most of which...written on the kitchen table in the small hours of the morning because our first child was born in January 1982...and she didn't sleep terribly well.A lot of those lectures were written with a small child underfoot..." (Q60).

"...This article about Ius ad Bellum and Ius in Bello came out of that. I started thinking about the relationship between the law in the [UN] Charter that says you may not use force except in certain very narrowly defined circumstances, that's the Ius ad Bellum, the law on going to war; and humanitarian law, the Ius in Bello if you are in an armed conflict this is what you must and mustn't do. In a sense, the fact that international law has both of these rules is rather bizarre; we wouldn't say burglary is prohibited but, if you commit burglary you must follow the following standards.....The question, to my mind... was that... you can only take self defence actions which are proportionate to the goal of your self defence....[O]ne of the things that we don't really bother about is....the relationship between proportionality and self defence...the restrictions of the law of armed conflict, the Ius in Bello." (Q180)

"...Quite a lot of people in the law of armed conflict, the humanitarian law world, thought this was nonsense, it was adding an extra level of complexity..." (Q181).

I pointed out that his then colleague Philip Allott denigrated even the notion of a "law of war". Sir Christopher replied pithily that "Philip likes saying things to provoke.If you actually put to him the question, does he think there should be no law that prohibits slaughtering prisoners of war or murdering the civilians when you occupy territory, I don't think he would think that that was such a good idea.Philip takes the view that by having a law of war you make war acceptable.That's not a new idea, Tolstoy[19] discussed it in War and Peace and it reflects the views of Admiral Fisher[20], the great Jackie Fisher, who told the Hague Peace Conference that the best thing to do was to threaten your enemy that you'll boil your prisoners in oil; you'll murder his children, and then he'll keep clear of you.I've never actually seen that in international society.Generally speaking, the absence of any restraints within war tends to make war more likely, not less." (Q56).

In this connection, Sir Christopher made a very telling comment, which drew a distinction that I suspect is often unappreciated. "One of the reasons why [the law of war] became my main research focus is that I found it so very interesting working in a subject where the people you worked with were a mixture of academics, government lawyers and the military, and they were an extraordinarily friendly group.... people who'd held quite high military rank, some of whom had served in the Second World War...they were very welcoming to those of us who were young academics.I wouldn't say that other areas of international law were always the same.Humanitarian law....is the softer, friendlier term for the laws of war [which applies in Bello, and] is a cousin of human rights law.I never found human rights conferences quite as welcoming and friendly as the humanitarian law ones, nor were they as diverse." (Q65).

When asked how his notions on this complex subject, developed on his kitchen table in the early hours of the morning, have survived the passage of forty years, Sir Christopher steadfastly adhered to his original thinking. "I think I would stand by virtually everything in that article. Some of it would need a lot of refinement and most of it would need to take account of new practice, new examples and so on, but I don't resile from the basic theory." (Q185). Here was a wonderful example of the vision of a young academic not dimming, even when seen through the lens of hindsight.

There followed a period of thirteen years (until 1996) during which Christopher Greenwood carved himself a niche in international law and became an acknowledged doyen in the laws of armed conflict. This period coincided with the continuing Middle East conflicts:between the Israelis and various Palestinian factions, and in particular the regional conflicts involving the Iraqis under Saddam Hussein. This gave him much food for thought, and he wrote several seminal articles on the topic.

During this period Chris Greenwood also produced his highly-regarded, if short, manual which appeared in 1993 [21]. It was written at the behest of the military authorities and set out his interpretations of the legal aspects of armed conflict, and in particular the distinctions between conflicts ad Bellum and in Bello to which we have already referred.

"During the late eighties and early nineties there was a very valuable, thriving dialogue between the military, particularly the army but not exclusively so, all three armed services, and those of us who worked on the international law of armed conflict.The Strategic and Combat Studies Institute, which is mainly about military thinking of a broader kind, also touched on this issue of the law of armed conflict and asked me if I would write a pamphlet about it. ...It was an attempt to summarise some of the central issues in the laws of armed conflict for a military audience. So it's no good their engaging in long and abstract debate about the law; you've got to actually get down to how it's applied on the ground.I very much enjoyed writing it.I keep meaning to update it but I'm afraid I've just been too busy".(Q167)

In effect, war is a fast moving landscape, and for the military commanders who are literally on the ground, some of the legal ground rules need to be available. Again it was a great tribute to Christopher Greenwood's standing in these matters that he was approached to produce a practical, "layperson's" rule of thumb.

This manual was written in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the resultant so called "Gulf War" in 1991. Christopher produced several scholarly analyses specifically on this conflict and I draw readers' attention to two: the first was his 1991 collection co-edited with Eli Lauterpacht [22], Marc Weller[23] and Daniel Bethlehem[24] -The Kuwait Crisis[25], of which he said "The ‘Kuwait Conflict' volume, which four of us edited, is a collection of documents. It's a very useful collection of documents and I still use it quite often." (Q67), and his thought-provoking analysis, "New World Order or Old? The Invasion of Kuwait and the Rule of Law" [26].

The Gulf War had been sanctioned ostensibly by the UN Security Council in what, with hindsight one now sees as a brief window in which the Security Council functioned as it had been initially intended. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989/90, Russia had been much more amenable to helping govern world events. This had prompted George W Bush[27] to claim that the co-operation in the sanctioning and subsequent military operations had heralded a new world order.

Christopher Greenwood's retrospective legal analysis of the situation, whilst admitting that "what Bush said was fine in terms of political rhetoric..." qualified this by saying that "I didn't think it was right in international law. The first part of the article was saying that this wasn't, in fact, a new world order [but] an attempt to enforce one of the key planks of the existing world order.Where it was new, was in the way that there was that enforcement, and Bush was right in pointing to the role of the Security Council.." (Q186).

Greenwood's analysis is the one that has stood the test of time and proven to be quite prophetic, but it did throw up the vexed question that legal right or wrong is one thing, but enforcing the international, UN-based rules quite another. He drew this out clearly using a modern analogy between the Iraqi example of a militarily relatively weak state, vis a vis a powerful state: "International law applies to all states.What you can do about it will vary, there's no doubt about that.The scope for dealing with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was very different from the scope for dealing with the Russian Federation's annexation of Crimea [28]." (Q187).

London School of Economics and an opening up of horizons (1996-2009)

The sum total of his writings, teaching, and numerous court cases had endowed Chris with a reputation that belied his post of lecturer at Cambridge, and although he was "very happy at Cambridge..." he was feeling "...just a little bit nervous of ending up rather too comfortable in the tutorial college-based world of Cambridge..." and that it was "...important to try and move into a different field.." (Q75). Consequently when the chair of International Law became available in 1996 at LSE (on the elevation of Rosalyn Higgins to the bench on the ICJ), Christopher Greenwood applied, and was successful.

He had anticipated that LSE would provide quite a different academic milieu, and this was certainly the case. He experienced this in two ways.

Firstly, in teaching he was able to concentrate solely on international law: "For years at Cambridge I'd taught other subjects; I taught criminal law, ..conflict of laws, constitutional law, and European Union law, but by the mid 1990s, the pace of development in both international and European law had reached the stage where it was getting more and more difficult to keep up with everything, so I was quite grateful to be able to concentrate on international law." (Q78).

Secondly, the methods and audiences' backgrounds were different: "I taught the international law undergraduate course at LSE...[but] the students weren't all lawyers, many of them were doing International Relations...[so I had to] lecture in a different way from Cambridge...[Here] only half the class would have done [legal studies]. [I also] did the law of the United Nations and a bit of international criminal law, which was quite good fun to do, especially since the ICC was being set up at the time." (Q78).

As for his research, Christopher Greenwood made a conscious effort to "...branch out a bit more....I was afraid that, particularly by the late eighties, early nineties, I'd been concentrating too much on laws of war scholarship. I didn't lose my interest in the law of armed conflict at all, but I did try to delve into other areas of international law in my publications. Particularly I became very interested in jurisdictional immunities because that was a large part of my [legal] practice and I found that the practice and academic work here interacted very effectively." (Q82).

Apropos his latter comment, I tallied from Sir Christopher's CV, that during his time at LSE (1996-2009), he was involved in thirteen cases: three at the ICJ, three at the European Human Rights Court, two at the ECJ, three ICSID cases, two UNCLOS cases, and also nine cases before UK courts. I asked him how this interacted with his teaching, and he echoed what other ESA scholars (e.g. Eli Lauterpacht, and Tony Jolowicz[29]) had said in the past - that it added to the effectiveness of their lecturing.

"I certainly hope it didn't detract from my teaching in any way.I think it was actually a great help to be able to bring some practical experience to that teaching....I think the students found it helpful...It's also quite useful to get people to focus on the sort of decisions that have to be made in practice...I like to think that having a foothold in practice made me a better teacher." (Q94).

In addition, Chris Greenwood said that his teaching preferences differed from the norm at LSE, because he enjoyed teaching and interacting with undergraduates, in contrast to many of his colleagues. " ...[For] a lot of people [at LSE] teaching Masters students and supervising PhDs became the focus......I enjoyed teaching the basic international law course to undergraduates.I've always found teaching undergraduates very stimulating and I think it's the place where you test out whether you can actually explain a complicated idea in terms that people can understand." (Q100).

It was this ability to reach out to undergraduates that Sir Christopher said was the highlight for him of his time at LSE. However, the teaching arrangements there came with one disadvantage compared to Cambridge, Because of the lack of the small group supervisions and teaching, it was much more difficult to have close relationships with individual students, making one's pastoral duties quite different in the two institutions.

He was asked of his greatest regret of his time at LSE: "I never finished the monograph I should have worked on." (Q80).

During this time Christopher Greenwood consolidated his position as a pre-eminent international lawyer, and three singular honours were bestowed upon him: he was made Queen's Council in 1999; awarded the CMG - Queen's Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George in 2002; was made a Middle Temple Bencher in 2003. When I asked him of the circumstances of the first two, he surmised that both were the result of his appearing in two high profile international law court cases.

In the former, his appearance before the House of Lord in 1998 was critical. "I had just put in an application [to become QC]....and I then got asked to argue the Pinochet[30] case in the House of Lords, effectively for the Government of Spain.I was paid by the Crown Prosecution Service, but the CPS acts for the requesting government in an extradition case. The Pinochet case, obviously, attracted an enormous amount of attention.It was an extremely challenging case to do.... I think doing the Pinochet case in 1998 to '99 was certainly a boost to my chances of being made a QC." (Q85).

Three years later Queen Elizabeth bestowed his CMG. "You never know quite what it's for.It's services to international law, but I think it may have had something to do with the fact that the previous year [2001] I'd been the lead counsel for Britain in a case in the European Court of Human Rights, called Banković v Belgium and others[31].We had had quite a considerable success in it, so I put it down to that." (Q87).

This particular case has been described by Sir Christopher as a watershed in the court's jurisprudence[32], and I asked him to explain why it was so important, and presumably why it had been considered worthy of national recognition. "Well...before Bankovic there had been a lot of speculation about the extent to which the European Convention on Human Rights applied to what different organs of state did in terms of their action outside the territory of the state concerned...[bearing in mind that] the European Convention lays down rights which a state has to respect as regards people within its jurisdiction.Now, a school of thought had grown up that said you can apply that also to huge areas of warfare.Bankovic, I think, excludes that possibility where you're talking about, for example, aerial bombardment, which was the issue there....conflicts between two opposing armies." (Q97). One can understand that eliciting a clear cut decision from an international court was/is an unusual phenomenon, and why Sir Christopher's part in this was given recognition.

Finally, being made a Bencher gave him "great joy...The Benchers of the Inn are a little bit like the Fellows of a Cambridge college, except that there are many more of them. It gave me a wonderful social and academic focus in London which I always thoroughly enjoy." (Q88).

After thirteen years at LSE, Sir Christopher moved onto the next phase of his journey into the varied terrains of international law. As he said, "I was beginning to find the stress of trying to be a professor and a barrister at the same time was taking its toll.It's fine getting up at five in the morning when you're in your forties; by the time you're in your late fifties you're less enthusiastic about it..." (Q103).

International Court of Justice (2009-2018).

The pinnacle of Sir Christopher's career came in 2009 when he was elected to the bench of the ICJ in The Hague. He became the last British holder of such an honour that stretched back to the initiation of the Court in 1946 [33]. The same year that he was elected, Christopher Greenwood was knighted by Prince Charles.

When asked about the selection process he reiterated the complexity that Rosalyn Higgins had recalled during her ESA interview. "[I]t's Byzantine...You first have to be nominated by the National Group of the Permanent Court of Arbitration which, in the case of the British has, by tradition, been vigorously independent of government. The group that nominated me was chaired by Sir Arthur Watts[34], former Foreign Office Legal Adviser, but it included Lord Bingham[35], the presiding Law Lord; Dame Rosalyn Higgins, who was then the British judge at the International Court; and Sir Eli Lauterpacht..... They nominated me as the candidate to replace Rosalyn when she was retiring from the Court.I had an interesting year of going round several rounds of meetings at the UN, but also trips to the Middle East and to Southern Africa and a number of other countries in Europe to lobby for support.It's alien to the British tradition, this idea of judges having election addresses and going around campaigning for votes but I'm afraid it's an integral part of the process for the International Court." (Q101).

During his time on the bench, Sir Christopher was involved in 38 cases, and although clearly he was not in a position to discuss particular cases, did agree that a large number did involve border disputes in Central American countries, particularly Nicaragua, and that many involved the extensions of national boundaries offshore. These involved becoming familiar with issues that related to colonial history, geology, and various geomorphological phenomena, which was an aspect he found fascinating.

I asked Sir Christopher about this broadening of his expertise, and it harked back to the fact that while at LSE, he had been an advisor to Honduras, along with Philippe Sands[36], in the 2007 Nicaragua v Honduras[37] case in the Caribbean Sea regarding the extension of the Coco River boundary through its delta offshore and the ownership of, inter alia, the Bobel Cay Islands. Sir Christopher recalled how this had affected his appreciation of the issues when sitting on the other side of the bar. "....That was very useful background for when I became a judge at the International Court because we did a lot of work on maritime boundaries. The thing about rivers is that they shift constantly...., [but on]....the continental shelf, there's the historical evidence about mining exploitation, fishing and the resources of the water column above it. We've rather moved away from a period when there was a lot of very heavy science about tectonic plates - the International Court rather snuffed that out in the 1980s" (Q96).

As for the relatively large number of cases involving Central American states with which he had to deal while on the bench, he put it down to precedence. "I think in Nicaragua's case they had a great success in the International Court, as they saw it, in the 1980s in their case against the United States.That helped create a mindset that the Court was a resource that Nicaragua should use, but the Central American and South American countries have always been very keen supporters of the Court.You get a very large number of cases between them in the International Court of Justice and generally a very high record of compliance as well, but I agree with you, Nicaragua was exceptional."(Q108).

While at the ICJ (2009-2018), Sir Christopher was pleased to have been able to leave an important legacy in its administrative structure by persuading it "to take IT a bit more seriously.The Court had been very slow in adopting computerisation and even slower still to use the facility to access documents from outside the building.I think we managed to make some considerable progress.That's one of the things I feel I managed to achieve when I was there because I chaired the IT Committee for quite a long time.The proof of that particular pudding is that they were able to cope with the pandemic[38] much more easily because each judge could log in to all the documents they needed from home.Now, that may not seem very revolutionary because law firms have been doing this for years and so have national courts, but it certainly seemed like a revolution in the pencil and paper world of the International Court."(Q113)

On a general level, Sir Christopher's time on the ICJ had at least two further important legacies: the significance of his leaving; and the opportunities it gave him to write articles where he expressed the breadth of his thinking on matters international.

Looking at the first of these. When Sir Christopher left the ICJ in 2018, he was not replaced by a British judge, and this broke a tradition that had extended back over seventy years. I asked him to comment on the changing face of international law, and whether in his opinion, it was inevitable that countries with a long tradition in this field would become less influential in the future.

"In one respect, yes, because that expertise is now present in many more countries than was once the case.That can only be a good thing. Obviously, I would regret any diminution of influence of the United Kingdom and I regretted losing my seat at the Court as part of that process, but I think it's wonderful that you now have so many countries where there are really first rate international lawyers and where governments are taking international law very seriously.I think roughly half the states in the world have now appeared in proceedings in the ICJ, either as parties or as states taking part in advisory proceedings and that's a dramatic change from when I was a student." (Q115).

I also asked whether he thought that in the case of the UK, Brexit had had any effect in this regard. "I think the jury's still out on that one.I won't conceal the fact that I think Brexit was a disaster.Wrong decision by Britain, but it's done and there's no point in revisiting that debate now.It does, however, leave us with a very difficult relationship between Britain and its European neighbours and, I think, a big question mark about exactly what Britain's role in the wider world is going to be - to what extent can Britain be influential as a medium-sized state, but still a nuclear power and a Permanent Member of the Security Council now it is outside the framework of now 27 EU states?I don't think in itself it's damaged Britain's reputation as a respecter of international law; I think that it could do if we start tearing up agreements we've concluded.That I think would be very damaging. A state is entitled to leave a treaty body if it wishes to do so and that was the decision of a clear majority of the people and I think it has to be respected." (Q145).

In summary, he sees that the rise of expertise in international jurisprudence globally inevitably challenging the position of established proponents in international fora - which he welcomes. On the other hand, whether its immediate effect in the case of the UK has been amplified by Brexit, he is unsure.

On the second issue, Sir Christopher wrote twelve publications during the time that he was on the ICJ bench and it is significant that several of these were on topics that examined fundamental aspects of international law. The most broad-ranging of these were as invited book chapters, on which I invited him to comment in the third conversation that we held. As for his choice of this medium for disseminating his view, specialist books tend to have a far more restricted readership than journal articles and he conceded that "there's a long running argument about whether book chapters are more or less valuable than articles in peer reviewed journals.I don't think it matters, frankly; I think what matters is the quality of what you write rather than where you publish it." (Q81). Certainly his views on these topics are of great interest to students of international law.

One[39] of these publications stands out, as it gets to the heart of the concept of what constitutes international law. In this essay Sir Christopher shows how deeply he believes in the virtues of this as a world-embracing and unifying phenomenon. His chapter derived from the F. A. Mann lecture he had given in 2009[40]. In it he rebuts the premise put forward by Professor Martii Koskenniemi[41] in the early 2000s[42] that there had been and would continue to be entropy (what he calls "fragmentation") in the concept of classical international law as various subject areas fell under the jurisdiction of a variety of specialist courts and adjudicating bodies.

Sir Christopher believes passionately that such "fragmentation" would be the death knell of international law and has to be avoided, and he sets out what he sees as the central tenet of international law that must be protected. "At the core of international law there are certain rules and principles about conclusion of treaties, treaty interpretation, reservation, and state responsibility which really have to apply across the whole of international law.If you start getting a different approach to treaty interpretation in investment arbitration from the approach that applies more generally then the result is that it doesn't just amount to different courts going different ways....you begin to undermine the whole fabric of international law.States conclude a treaty on the assumption that it will be interpreted and applied in accordance with certain basic principles and those basic principles are common to all their treaties." (Q149).

To his obvious relief, Sir Christopher does not believe that this has in fact happened, and that various bodies have preserved international law's basic integrity. " ....I don't think the problem is anything like as bad as [Koskenniemi] made it out to be...I do think that the fear of fragmentation was exaggerated....I think international law has pulled back from that particular brink....For example...in its judgments on Jones v United Kingdom[43] and in Al-Adsani v United Kingdom[44] on sovereign immunity, had the European Court of Human Rights decided...[that] detaining an enemy combatant in wartime or in armed conflict, in accordance with the Prisoner of War Convention, was a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, I think that would have been catastrophic ....[there would have been] a real risk that the European Convention could have been interpreted....in a way that made it impossible for military operations to be conducted. That would include a large slice of UN peacekeeping.." (Q149-150).

Sir Christopher explained that this unanimity has been reflected in other bodies which have "pulled back from the brink", as he put it, such as the Law of the Sea Tribunal and the ICJ, though he did concede that "There was a time when there was a bit of an arrogance on the part of the International Court that it didn't refer to other people's judgments.Happily that's gone. The Law of the Sea Tribunal never, I think, made that mistake and the Annex 7 arbitrations didn't either, so there's a much richer willingness to look at one another's case law than there used to be." (Q151).

In summary he believes that the three sources from which fragmentation could have emanated - the International Court of Justice, International Tribunal for Law of the Sea, and arbitration tribunals - have in fact all moved in the same direction because, at the heart of their activities they are applying treaty standards. " [W]hat is striking is that hasn't turned into an institutional rupture the way that it was predicted to do.It's probably a pity that we have these three different methods of settlement; it's very much a product of the time of the later stages of the Cold War, the thawing Cold War, if you like.I doubt that a Law of the Sea Convention today, if it were being drafted now, would come up with something as complicated as that, but it hasn't been the disaster it was predicted to be." (Q152).

Another area where treaty standards lie at the core of international law's interpretation is in domestic courts. This is a topic Sir Christopher examines in his chapter entitled "Development of International Law by national courts" in the 2017 Brill volume[45]. He shows that the core issue in accommodating international law in national courts is that "...[legally] an obligation under international law prevails over any rule of domestic law, including a constitutional law....it's no defence in the International Court for a state to say that, "Our constitution doesn't permit us to do this" if they are party to a treaty or bound by a rule of customary international law....then they must do it....How you enforce that, of course, can be very difficult....One of the examples of that is the famous Alabama arbitration from the 1870s where the fact that English domestic law did not permit the United Kingdom government to prevent the Alabama from sailing was not a defence to the liability for breaking a rule of international law of neutrality[46]." (Q160).

This example reiterates Sir Christopher's point that treaty obligations trump all other considerations in national courts. "[T]here are certain rules and principles about conclusion of treaties, treaty interpretation,reservation, and state responsibility which really have to apply across the whole of international law" (see Q149, above).

The question of how and when domestic courts can influence customary laws and state practice in international law is a more complex issue. For this to happen the court has to be prestigious and/or the incident in question particularly significant. Sir Christopher cited the example of the US Supreme Court in 1812, in the Schooner Exchange v McFadden[47] case which established the international principle of state immunity.

In view of the comments made by Dame Rosalyn Higgins in her ESA interview (Q148 in her interview) re a conversation she had with then US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice[48], apropos the US Congress (early 2000s) considering international law as "foreign law". (This was despite the fact that the US Supreme Court did occasionally cite it: for example, Justice O'Connor [49] said that the Supreme Court acknowledged the Law of the Sea). I posed the question of whether today the US Supreme Court would have decided this way, bearing in mind the circumstances of the Schooner Exchange incident[50].

Sir Christopher's opinion is that "....[In 1812, the US] was keen to make its impact... in what was still predominantly a European state system....Ironically, in more recent Supreme Court cases in America about sovereign immunity they have, in my view, gone down a bit of a blind alley in suggesting that sovereign immunity is not a requirement of international law, but merely a matter of comity....[which] as a matter of international law that's just plain wrong; ...the ICJ judgment in the jurisdiction immunities case takes a completely different view and I think the same is true of the European Convention on State Immunity, the UN Convention on State Immunity and the case law just about everywhere.What's interesting is that as a matter of US constitutional law it's probably wrong as well...Comity in 1812 was used largely interchangeably with international law to set it aside from domestic law obligations." (Q164).

He summed up the role domestic courts can have on international law in "three different ways: they impact through the medium of general principles; they can impact as judgments in their own right;....and may [display] ....an aspect of state practice which can't be ignored....[for example] in jurisdictional immunities cases, where concepts of jus cogens, war crimes, crimes against humanity prevailed over state immunity [which] is something which national courts had almost uniformly rejected." (Q166).

In this paper, Sir Christopher showed that international law is, in reality, a meld of international treaty obligations and domestic law - a marriage of legal principles.

Finally, Sir Christopher gave his vision of the role of judges in international law, and the principles that they should follow. This was in reply to a question of whether he agreed with his predecessor on the court, Dame Rosalyn Higgins, who had expounded her views in her Development of International Law through the Political Organs of the United Nations[51]. Her friend, Oscar Schachter[52] had said of this book that she faced squarely the contention that the views of governments expressed in UN debates and resolutions can have little legal significance because they are adopted for political and self serving interests. Her view was that "The job of the international lawyer is to look at the facts of the present case and at the policy issues involved and to find the preferred and better answer." (Her interview Q138)

Sir Christopher does not agree with this notion.

" I definitely wouldn't go as far as that.I'm perhaps more conservative, [with] a more rules-based view of law.I entirely agree with Rosalyn that international law is developed by political processes.... [But] as a judge you have to make decisions based on the law as it is at moment, not on what you might like it to be in the future... [Y]es, it is a matter of going to the underlying values, to the broad principles, but there are a lot of rules as well; some of them are very clear; some of them less so, but I don't think you can ignore them.I don't think Rosalyn Higgins is suggesting that you ignore them either and I don't agree with Oscar Schachter that the positions taken by states and the UN are of little or no significance in terms of law because I don't think that they are quite as politically expedient as he makes out..[C]ustomary international law is based on state practice supported by opinio juris, and I think that has to include the practice of states in international organisations." (Q141).

Magdalene College (2020-present) and prospective retirement

After twenty four years Christopher Greenwood returned to the collegiate milieu that he left in 1996 to experience the more expansive world of LSE. He was offered the post of Master of Magdalene College, following in the footsteps of Rowan Williams[53].

"It was a tremendous delight to come back to my old college...I accepted the offer with enthusiasm and I've never regretted it." (Q125).He found that whole academic world had changed and the academic standards had improved dramatically with a welcome change in attitude, where what he called "just college folk" were now outnumbered by people with a greater sense of "professionalism".

When I spoke to him the college and country were only beginning to emerge from the Covid pandemic, and he admitted that he had been unable to get on with his duties, as he had arrived in October 2020 when the pandemic had been "in full swing", just prior to the second lockdown.

Sir Christopher said that his term of office comes to an end when he is 72 (in 2027) and that "...when I've finished as Master of Magdalene I'm going to retire...I might continue doing a bit of arbitration work and writing, but I'm certainly not going to work full-time any more. [M]y aims for Magdalene and my Mastership: I have all sorts of ideas about what I would like to achieve, but the most important priority at the moment here, as in the whole of the University of Cambridge, is to get the place back on its feet after COVID and to see how we now have to respond to a very much changed environment." (Q199)

Retrospectives

I concluded our conversations (February 1^st 2022) with three questions that related to a career stretching across forty years that had taken him to the most prestigious positions available to an international lawyer.

- How has international law altered since Sir Christopher began practicing?

- What he thought his main scholarly contributions to international law had been? and

- Which of the the strands of his academic and judicial career had given him the most pleasure?

To the first question, his reply focussed on the topic where he originally make his reputation - the laws of war and armed conflict. This area has been a never-ending, fast changing landscape necessitating continual scrutiny of the international laws pertaining to it; vide the rise of ISIS, the ragged NATO retreat from Afghanistan (August 2021), annexation of Crimea (2014), while the current Russian invasion of Ukraine (February 24^th 2022) had not then begun.

"Wasn't it Maynard Keynes[54] who said, "When circumstances change, I change my mind.What do you do?"I certainly think differently about some of the things I wrote in the past and, would do it differently if I were doing it all over again today.I first started writing on international law more than 40 years ago and it would be amazing if ....things didn't happen to make you change your mind.I'm still very much wedded to the core concepts though, that humanitarian law is important and that it's important that we insist on its observance, however vicious an armed conflict might be." (Q196).

As a case in point, one of the forms of conflict that has increased in frequency since Sir Christopher wrote his comprehensive paper on the subject in 2003[55] viz terrorism, it has manifest itself in so many ways that it continues to defy legal definition. His views on the complexity of the problem and how legal attitudes have changed are of great interest, and Sir Christopherd include a comparison with terrorist acts committed in past eras. In the end, he sees treaties as the basis upon which legal sanction can be based.

"I think the search for a definition of terrorism really is like the search for the Holy Grail, it just wastes everybody's time.Let me give you...an example. [C]ertain acts take place for political reasons which I do not think anyone rational...would exclude from a definition of terrorism. for example...the Ariana Grande concert bombing[56].....[however] I think trying to find a definition that covers the cases you would like to cover in that sphere, while excluding the ones you don't,...such as the Mujahideen fighting against Russian soldiers in Afghanistan....is almost impossible to do. I suggested that it's better just to focus on treaties that deal with specific types of action....such as putting a bomb on an aeroplane, hijacking...[W]e can get agreement on that.Looking for a general purpose definition, doesn't work.

The difficulty....[is] understanding different types of terrorism.....In the last 30 years or so, there has been much more of an almost nihilistic violence where it's no good even thinking of sitting down and talking to these people. To whom would you talk, and what would you talk about?Perhaps it's better to go back to some of the violence of the very end of the 19^th century, the nihilist [and] anarchist movements that sprang up then.I found Joseph Conrad's[57] book very, very interesting, his figure of the professor in ‘The Secret Agent' is a fascinating one, manipulated in part by a government but largely engaged in what we would now call terrorism for ends that nobody could possibly understand." (Q194-195).

In answer to the second question, Sir Christopher said "I've enjoyed writing on international law across a wide spectrum.You'll realise, of course, that once I became a judge I had to be more circumspect in what I wrote which is why the articles from that period tend to be of a more theoretical bent, more generalist....I think the area of my writing that I'm most proud of is about the laws of armed conflict." (Q196).

Finally, regarding the personal satisfaction that he has derived from the breadth of his various activities, one can only conclude that Sir Christopher has had a well-rounded career where each category, undertaken in his various roles has contributed to his success and the esteem in which he is held. " I find it impossible to pick because I've enjoyed them all in different ways.I thoroughly enjoyed teaching, something that I haven't tried to go back to, but I very much enjoyed my career as a teacher, both here in Cambridge and at the LSE.I enjoyed the contact I had with students; I'm still in touch with many of my old students.I enjoyed my research and writing.I found advocacy extremely exhilarating and I like to think I contributed to the changing attitudes in the English courts towards international law through some of the cases I was able to argue.I enjoyed my judicial and arbitral work and still do." (Q198).

My interviews with Sir Christopher Greenwood were conducted with grace and impeccable courtesy on his behalf, and I was very fortunate to have been able to talk to him face to face, given the strictures of the Covid pandemic and his very busy schedule. His devotion to international law in all its forms shone through, and it was impressive to see how his fundamental beliefs have remained steadfast since his earliest encounters with the subject. We are privileged to have his views on record in our archive.