Covid-19 and international law: Sketching the parameters

This special issue of the Australian Year Book of International Law arises from a project started in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world. The project started as a series of short online essays grouped around the topic of COVID-19 and international law, the bulk of which were written between April and August 2020. In some ways, these essays are no different from what we as international lawyers normally do—providing commentary on how international law relates to the different dimensions of situations unfolding around us. Yet these essays, written during school shut-downs, campus closure, border restrictions, rising global infection rates and ongoing uncertainty as to what would happen next, are also valuable reflections in a time of great crisis: fitting perhaps for a discipline famously critiqued by Hilary Charlesworth as one of crisis, rather than situated in the everyday.