Nicola Claire Strain is currently a Doctoral Research Fellow at the PluriCourts Centre (Faculty of Law, University of Oslo) working on an research project analysing state consent to international jurisdiction. She holds a Master of Law degree (LLM) from the University of Cambridge and Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from the University of Western Australia. She is also an experienced lawyer, having held legal positions in Australia. Her research interests include trade law, investment law and international dispute settlement.
Nicola is currently working on an interdisciplinary research project analysing the process by which states give, modify and terminate their consent to the jurisdiction of international tribunals. As part of this research project, she is completing her doctoral thesis on the jurisdiction and applicable law of investor-state disputes and disputes before the World Trade Organization dispute settlement mechanism. The project aims to consider whether the WTO Panels and Appellate Body and investor-state dispute settlement bodies have jurisdiction to decide questions of public international law when such issues arise in connection with a dispute under the agreement conferring jurisdiction on the tribunal. The project attempts to provide a comparative analysis of these two dispute settlement mechanisms to analyse when it is legitimate to go beyond the terms of state consent to jurisdiction. In doing so, the project considers whether the differences between these dispute settlement regimes should result in a different approach. She is writing under the supervision of Professor Freya Baetens.

Duy Dinh is an expert on international trade and customs law. He obtained his master’s degree in International Law and Economics in 2013 at the World Trade Institute (Bern, Switzerland) and has recently fulfilled his PhD in Legal Studies at Bocconi University (Milan, Italy). His thesis brings new perspectives on rules of origin for services – an area of rule making that has received insufficient scholarly attention to date. He used to work as a lecturer in International Trade at Foreign Trade University (Hanoi, Vietnam) until 2015, and currently working as a consultant at the International Trade Centre in Geneva. He has published in both English and Vietnamese, discussing a number of topics in international trade law and policy, particularly rules of origin. His current project is looking at PTAs’ provisions on “principle of territoriality” and rules of origin, as applied to services. Particularly, the former aims to explore how services may escape the purview of provisions on principles of territoriality and the effect on rules of origin. The latter is on how rules of origin should be improved to take into account of service component as inputs for production.

Soledad Leal Campos  is an International Trade Lawyer a  Senior Policy Analyst, Consultant, Trainer and Facilitator. Soledad’s 25 year-expertise in international trade, investment and development includes 15 years as a multilateral negotiator for Mexico with postings first, to the OECD and later, the WTO, where she represented her country as Deputy Head of Mission. She is a consultant for the IADB and has worked for the OECD in a similar capacity. She designs and delivers face-to-face training sessions on trade policy and trade negotiations for Government officials. She is a lecturer on the Executive Master’s in International Negotiation and Policy Making at the Graduate Institute (Geneva) and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute’s Centre for Trade and Economic Integration. She achieved her Master's in International Economic Law at the University of Paris II and speaks Spanish, English, French and Italian.