The Squire Law Library and the Faculty of Law are pleased to announce that an entry for Philippe Joseph Sands, Professor of Law and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London, has been added to the Eminent Scholars Archive.
Professor Sands was interviewed in person at his home in Hampstead on two occasions during May and June 2026. In addition to transcripts of the audio recordings, readers will find a summary biography, and a list of his publications.
Philippe Sands was born in England in 1960 in Belsize Park, and has lived in North London all his life. His father Allan was English and his mother Ruth is French, but she escaped from Vienna at the outbreak of WWII as a baby and grew up in occupied Paris with her parents. Philippe had therefore an upbringing that combined English and French culture, although he went to the University College School in Belsize Park where he did A-levels in the late 70s. Philippe went up to Corpus Christi in 1979 where he obtained an LLB, and stayed on to complete his LLM, having been inspired to specialise in international law by luminaries such as Robbie Jennings, Derek Bowett, Eli Lauterpacht, and Philip Allott.
After graduating LLM, Philippe spent a year at Harvard as a Research Scholar (1983-84) and was introduced to the rough and tumble world of global international law by the civilian KALOO7 airliner incident in 1983 upon which he published a review of the legal issues involved. This was the first of an impressive bibliography of international law topics that continues to the present day.
He returned to Cambridge and St Catherine's College in 1984 and was the inaugural research fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre under Eli Lauterpacht, when a second major international incident – the Chernobyl nuclear disaster – set him on the road of investigating the legal issues of transborder environmental litigation that resulted ultimately in his ground-breaking 1994 volume Principles of International Environmental Law, a book that has run to 4 editions and is still widely lauded.
Professor Sands has held academic posts at King's College London, SOAS and UCL and has become a renowned authority on international courts and tribunals, and the selection process of international judges.
In recent years he has written numerous highly popular books on the Holocaust and related matters, which he belatedly learnt had affected his mother's side of the family. His most well-known East West Street has sold over a million copies. Because of these investigative texts he is widely sought as a public speaker and raconteur. His latest venture is a volume on the international crime of Ecocide, which he hopes will stand with Genocide, War Crimes, Crimes of Aggression, and Crimes Against Humanity as international crimes for which individuals can be held accountable.
In June 2026 Professor Sands, with inter alia, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cambridge.
In the ESA interviews, Professor Sands talks at length on all these matters in the frank and very open manner for which he has become widely known.
The Eminent Scholars Archive is also available to listen or subscribe to, via iTunes, SoundCloud, and most other podcast platforms.