Phoebe Okowa

Phoebe Okowa is Professor of Public International Law at Queen Mary University of London. In 2021, she was elected to the United Nations’ International Law Commission, becoming the first African woman to serve on the Commission since it was established in 1947. She has written extensively on general international law including the law of state responsibility, aspects of protection of the environment including protection of natural resources in conflict zones, the relationship between state responsibility and accountability for international crimes, and the application of international law by domestic courts. In 2026, she will deliver the Hague Academy lectures on accountability for colonial wrongs in international law. In addition to her purely academic work, she has undertaken extensive advisory work for governments and non-governmental organizations on questions of public international law including as counsel before the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

Okowa was born and educated in Kenya. After completing her Legum Baccalaureus (LL.B.) with first class honors at the University of Nairobi in 1987, Okowa won a Foreign and Commonwealth Office scholarship to Wadham College, University of Oxford, where she studied for the degree of Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL). She subsequently completed a doctorate in law (DPhil.) supervised by the Chichele Professor of International Law, the late Ian Brownlie. In 2024, she was conferred a Doctor of Laws (honoris Causa) by Stockholm University. She took her first academic appointment at the University of Bristol in 1993 before moving to Queen Mary, University of London. She has twice been Global Visiting Professor at NYU Law School (2011 and 2015) and was most recently visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva. Okowa is the joint editor of the Oxford Monographs in Public International Law (with Roger O’Keefe). She was for many years a member of the executive committee of the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S) and sits on the advisory board of numerous academic journals and learned societies. 

Cristina Tilley

Cristina Tilley is a legal scholar and former journalist who teaches tort and constitutional law, with a particular emphasis on defamation and speech injuries. Her scholarship investigates theories of interpersonal obligation as a foundation for comparing how private and public law can drive social justice. Her work has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Northwestern University Law Review, and the Journal of Tort Law, and has been selected for presentation at the Harvard / Yale / Stanford Junior Faculty Forum. In 2024, she gave the 41^st annual Presidential Lecture at the University of Iowa, where she is the Claire Ferguson-Carlson Fellow in Law.

Tilley graduated from Northwestern University Law School, where she served as Editor in Chief of the Northwestern University Law Review and went on to teach as a visiting assistant professor. After law school, she clerked for Judge Richard D. Cudahy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She was a member of the Appellate Litigation Group at Mayer Brown, where she worked extensively on asbestos litigation, securities class action issues, and First Amendment matters. Prior to her law career, she was a news reporter, specializing in business and legal affairs at United Press International and other publications.