Tom Sparks

Tom Sparks is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. In 2020/21 he was a Judicial Fellow of the International Court of Justice, in the team of Judge Peter Tomka. He completed his PhD at Durham University in 2018.

Article

An Urgent Call for Climate Mainstreaming

Saskia Stucki Guillaume Futhazar Tom Sparks Erik Tuchtfeld Hannah Foehr

The world is facing climate emergency, one of a series of overlapping and mutually reinforcing environmental crises. In 2017, more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries signed the World Scientists’...

Symposium
Climate Justice

Judging climate change obligations: Can the World Court rise to the occasion?

Tom Sparks Nataša Nedeski Gleider Hernández

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic piles crisis atop crisis. As confirmed infection rates cross 2.5 million and attributed deaths pass 170,000 (at time of writing, in April 2020), it is increasingly being...

Symposium
Climate Justice

Judging climate change obligations: Can the World Court rise to the occasion?

Tom Sparks Nataša Nedeski Gleider Hernández

In Part I of this post, we sought to identify the core rules of international environmental law that needed evolution and clarification for a claim relating to climate change to...

Article

The urgent, the plausible and the irreparable

Tom Sparks Mark Somos

The ICJ’s decision on Iran’s application for provisional measures in its high-profile proceedings against the United States of America for alleged violations of their 1955 Treaty of Amity was handed...

Interview

On history, geography, and radical change in international law

Silvia Steininger Tom Sparks

These are exciting times for international legal scholarship - on this point, the interviewers and Professor BS Chimni can immediately agree. But what are the consequences of recent challenges to...