Dr Megan Donaldson
UCL Faculty Member
Bio:
Megan Donaldson is Associate Professor of Public International Law in the Faculty of Laws, UCL. She works in public international law, its history and theory, with an emphasis on how the past development of the international legal order has echoes in the present. Aspects of this work bear closely on how the legal and political structures within states shape the interactions between states, and vice versa.
She has written the first comprehensive history of how and why international law preserved the secret treaty as a viable instrument of international cooperation, and research on contemporary international law has explored the workings of international institutions, with a particular focus on transparency; public law and constitutional values; and the use of languages of public law in global governance.
Representative publications:
Megan Donaldson, Secrecy, Publicity and the Making of the International Legal Order (monograph in progress; under contract with OUP)
Annabel Brett, Megan Donaldson and Martti Koskenniemi (eds), History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the State (CUP, 2021)
Megan Donaldson, ‘The Survival of the Secret Treaty: Publicity, Secrecy, and Legality in the International Legal Order’ (2017) 111 American Journal of International Law 575