Anna Saunders

Anna Saunders is a Lecturer at the ANU Law School. She researches in international law, the history and theory of intellectual property, and the political economy of science and technology. She is a founding member and the inaugural Chair of the Law, Science, and Technology in Society Hub (LSTS Hub) at ANU Law School, and serves on the editorial boards of the London Review of International Law and the Journal of Law and Political Economy. 

The project

Title: Industrial Natures: Making International Law through Patent Form

"In the context of the climatic crisis the discipline of international law is undergoing a moment of intense self-reflection. Influenced by work in the environmental humanities, legal scholars have begun to position debates relating to international responsibility for harms arising from climate change as part of a broader history of industrialisation and of international law’s role in distributing the wealth and power arising from it.  These questions of industrial history have been particularly significant for scholars working in international intellectual property, which has long been positioned as a means of engineering scientific and technological interconnection between peoples. The geophysical implications of these accumulated practices of technological use mean that these scholars are searching for new ways to understand and conceptualise the relationship between patents of invention and their physical and ecological manifestations. This project is to author a monograph based on my doctoral work completed in 2025. In the monograph I develop a history of how international law managed technical relations between peoples through the patent form. I trace the story of how the patent moved from being a privilege, granted by the state and situated in place and social context, to a more stable form of property that could move across jurisdictions in specific ways. I demonstrate how the contestation and consolidation of the ways that the patent became property occurred through changing arguments about human relations with the natural world."

Hosting institution: Sciences Po

Selective Bibliography

• Anna Saunders, ‘Reserving Time: Third Parties and Temporal Orders in Industrial Property Lawmaking’ in José Bellido, Marius Buning, Allison Fish and Brad Sherman (eds), The Future of Intellectual Property: A History (under contract with Oxford University Press)
• Anna Saunders, ‘Allende’s Workshop: Technological Diplomacy and the Stakes of Solidarity’ CIL Dialogues (20 December 2023) (published in Spanish as ‘La Diplomacia Tecnológica y los Retos de la Solidaridad’ Agenda Estado de Derecho (4 March 2024, Natalia Morales Cerda trans).
• Anna Saunders, ‘Constitution-Making as a Technique of International Law: Reconsidering the Postwar Inheritance’ (2023) 118 American Journal of International Law 251.
• Anna Saunders, ‘Law after Dominium: Thinking with Martti Koskenniemi on Sovereignty, Property and Transformation’ (2023) 13 Transnational Legal Theory 475.
• Kathryn Greenman, Anne Orford, Anna Saunders and Ntina Tzouvala (eds), Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).