Tobias' Introduction

Again, thanks to Nicki for creating the blog - and also to Bjoern, for explaining some things about German lawyers' careers that I will not now have to go into again.

So, in short, I have also participated in the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition in 2000/2001, with Nicki and Bjoern (I note that Bjoern has not mentioned this - nothing personal, I trust). I continued my involvement with various special and general issues of international law at later stages of my undergraduate work, and I wrote an essay in it as part of my First State Examination. I passed that exam in December 2004 and then became a colleague of Nicki's and Bjoern's at the Walther Schuecking Institute at Kiel University in January 2005; this does make me the most junior contributor to this blog, but not by much.
Like the other two, I am also working on my doctoral thesis, which is one Third States' Interests before International Courts and Tribunals.
As a research fellow at the Institute, my tasks mostly centred on acting as one of the Assistant Editors of the - forthcoming - commentary on the Statute of the International Court of Justice, edited by Andreas Zimmermann, Christian Tomuschat and Karin Oellers-Frahm (the other, and, to be honest, more senior Assistant Editor is Christian J. Tams, also of this institute).

Besides this job and my thesis, my interests within the broad church that is international law have tended to concentrate on human rights law, so that will be my chosen field in this blog (another factor being that I know next to diddly-squat about the other two subjects, relatively speaking). I have recently had an article on 'The Admissibility of Evidence Obtained by Torture under International Law' accepted by the European Journal of International Law and I am presently writing a case note on a judgment by the British House of Lords on the same topic for the Journal of International Criminal Justice. No prizes for guessing that I like to read British cases, then; I have, after all, studied for one term in 2002 at the University of Surrey, and I plan to take an LL.M. course in the UK later this year.

I have also published in other fields of international law (‘International Law Aspects of Sea Ports’, in Alexander Trunk/Valeriy Abramovich Musin, eds., International Commercial Arbitration and International Maritime Law from a German and Russian Perspective, 2004, and, with Professor Dr Andreas Zimmermann, a commentary on Article 60 of the ICJ Statute, in the above-mentioned commentary), so I don't think I can only speak about human rights. Anyway, human rights law is just another part of international law, so I feel that more general issues of international law may properly infuse our thinking in the more specialised branches.

As may have become apparent, I do like to properly analyse the law, even where there are no or conflicting statements of authority. On the other hand, I am not remotely sad if my views are shared by authority, and I am likely to find out if they are, so do expect me to provide citations where appropriate.