Biography

Dr Lo Giacco is an Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University. She holds an LLD from Lund University and an LLM from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. She held positions as visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, at the Amsterdam Centre of International Law, and at the Manchester International Law Centre, to which she was also an invited guest lecturer in international law (2018 and 2019).

Letizia’s research explores structural questions of international law and combines theory and practice with a focus on international courts and judicial practices in a global governance perspective. She has published on questions of authority and formation of international law, looking at the use of judicial decisions as epistemic tools in international law argumentation. Letizia is the author of Judicial Decisions in International Law Argumentation - Between Entrapment and Creativity (Hart, 2022) and published several other contributions on questions of judicial discretion in international law. Her article "When a Dispute Exists: The Emerging Evidentiary Approach of the ICJ in Common Interests Proceedings" (forthcoming on the LPICT) has been the recipient of the 2024 Rosalyn Higgins Prize.

While at the EUI, Letizia will inquire processes and practices institutionalising private actors in areas of public/community interest under international law, thus exploring categories of public and private from an international law standpoint. A first output of this project on the "public" dimension of public international law has appeared on Transnational Legal Theory in 2023

Letizia is a Member of the Editorial Board of the LJIL and she is the co-founder of the Leiden Hub on the Theory and History of International Law, an interdisciplinary platform for theoretical and/or historical questions on international law. She has also been a founding member of the interest group on international criminal justice of the European Society of International Law.

Fields of expertise