Abstract

For this symposium, I was not assigned to talk about Megan [Fairlie]’s work per se, and so I initially planned to discuss something completely different. In the end, however, I came back to Megan’s work because I believe her scholarship provides a new way of thinking about the entrenched challenges currently facing our collective field of study: international criminal law and procedure.

As we all know, Megan was an accomplished comparativist, and her area of expertise was criminal procedure. Even more particularly, Megan specialized in the criminal procedure of the still relatively new international criminal courts and tribunals. She focused on many topics—some broader, some more narrow—but throughout these topics and the articles containing them, Megan’s primary concern and her primary directive was fairness. In countless articles and book chapters, Megan identified flaws in international criminal procedural rules and practices, and she advanced proposals that would ameliorate, if not remedy, those flaws. In doing so, Megan expressly employed the language of fairness. As an overall matter, Megan was concerned about the fairness of blending adversarial and non-adversarial procedures, but her emphasis on fairness trickled down to discussions of individual topics. Whether it was the prosecution’s objectivity obligation, the submission of evidence without a ruling on admissibility, or the ICC’s sub-optimal jurisprudence on no-case-to-answer motions, Megan emphasized the compelling need to ensure a defendant’s fair trial rights. Indeed, in one of her final articles, Defense Issues at the International Criminal Court, Megan passionately exhorted ICC observers to “commit to unwavering fair trial expectations.”

This abstract has been taken from the author's opening paragraphs.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Publication Information

19 Florida International University Law Review 501-515 (2025)

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