Keynote Lecture | Lauri Mälksoo (Tartu) | The Concept of Treaty as a Matter of Translation: Russia's historical interactions with the West

This talk forms part of the 2025 Leibniz ScienceCampus Conference: Navigating Epistemic, Cultural and Legal Translations, which runs from 23-25 April 2025.

No registration is required to attend this keynote talk.

Abstract |  This presentation examines Russia's treaty relations with Western between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, exploring the question how the concept of treaty evolved. What counted as exceptions to pacta sunt servanda - that treaties must be honored? And what grounds for the termination of treaties, such as clausula rebus sic stantibus - a fundamental change of circumstances - were accepted by the treaty partner(s)? Did Russia understand treaties differently than Western powers? The presentation will also look at leading Russian authors on treaties such as Fedor Martens during the Tsarist period and Evgeny Pashukanis, Vladimir Shurshalov and others during the Soviet period. Moreover, Western and German discussions on treaties in Russia and the Soviet Union will be reexamined - reflecting on authors like Erich Kaufmann, Theodor Schweisfurth in Germany but also Jan Triska and Robert Slusser at Stanford. Finally, the talk will also reference the historical-semiotic interpretation of treaties by Yuri Lotman.

Lauri Mälksoo is Professor of International Law at the University of Tartu. He is member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and since 2021 has been a member of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (the Venice Commission). Since 2023 he has served as a member of the advisory board of the Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law. He received his legal education at the University of Tartu (LL.B. 1998), Georgetown University (LL.M. 1999) and Humboldt University Berlin (PhD 2002). He conducted post-doctoral research at New York University and the University of Tokyo, while he was also a research fellow at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

His publications include the monographs, Illegal Annexation and State Continuity: the Case of the Incorporation of the Baltic States by the USSR (Brill, 2003) and Russian Approaches to International Law (OUP, 2015). He is also co-editor of Russia and the European Court of Human Rights: The Strasbourg Effect (CUP, 2017) and author of numerous articles and chapters on the history and current developments of international law, particularly in Russia and the former Soviet Union. He has recently contributed to The Oxford Handbook of International Law in Europe. In the past, he has also advised the Estonian Chancellor of Justice on matters of international and European law as well as been director of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute, a foreign ministry funded think tank based in Tallinn.