Our annual Summer Work Series features Berkeley Law students reflecting on their current job. These first-person accounts detail career-advancing work and skill building in many legal areas, often through opportunities gained in partnership with the Career Development Office.
Rising 3L Anchita Dasgupta is the incoming co-editor-in-chief of the Berkeley Journal of International Law and co-president of the International Arbitration Association and International Law Society. She came to Berkeley Law with a longstanding interest in the history of international law and the practice of sovereign-state representation before international courts and tribunals, and before law school read for a Masters in Philosophy in Law at Oxford where she studied the role of non-legal actors in developing canonical doctrines of international humanitarian law.
At Berkeley Law’s Human Rights Clinic this past year, Dasgupta worked as a legal advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on Counter-terrorism and Human Rights, Ben Saul, and UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria member Finnuala Ní Aoláin. She spent her 1L summer as a legal intern at the Office of the Prosecutor at the UN International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals in The Hague, and was a legal intern at the U.S.-based human rights nonprofit Center for Justice and Accountability last semester.
Below, Dasgupta discusses her summer work as an assistant at the 77th session of the International Law Commission in Geneva.
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When I was 12 years old, I signed up for a Model UN ‘research team’ — one of the few extracurricular activities my middle school in Kolkata, India offered that didn’t require us to play a sport.
Even before I had to read Shakespeare for English or solve a quadratic equation in Algebra, I could recite from memory the four sources of international law, the function of the Sixth Committee of the UN General Assembly, and the number of judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Assisting Professor Nilufer Oral — a prolific international lawyer, International Law Commission (ILC) member, and chair of its Study Group on Sea-Level Rise — at the United Nations Office in Geneva is thus that little girl’s dream come true.
The ILC is the UN’s principal body for the progressive development and codification of international law. When my teammates and I competed in the 2026 Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition on behalf of Berkeley Law, we spent hours poring over the ILC’s extensive work on the law of treaties and general principles of law.
To be inside the room witnessing the behind-the-scenes of this work feels surreal.
When I first corresponded with Professor Oral in the early spring, I did not know of her deep personal ties to the Bay Area. Although she is Turkish by nationality and directs the National University of Singapore’s Center of International Law, she spent much of her childhood in northern California — first as a Berkeley undergraduate studying psychology, then launching her legal career in the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office, and then at Berkeley’s Law of the Sea Institute (LOSI).
I first learned of Professor Oral’s Berkeley connection from Professor Saira Mohamed, who supervised my independent study this past year on the legality of reservations to treaties codifying jus cogens norms. That paper was selected for the 2026 Salzburg-Cutler Fellowship in D.C., administered by the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law, where I befriended a student at NYU Law School who had assisted Professor Oral at the ILC before and made the introduction.
Forging an independent path
Berkeley doesn’t have a formal ILC fellowship program, but the opportunities the school gave me helped me chart my own path. Berkeley’s Edley Grant and the Women+ of Color Collective’s public interest stipend enabled me to create my own summer fellowship.
The work itself has been a crash course in the world of international law-making and diplomacy. The ILC rarely calls for votes — members build consensus, adjusting text to accommodate everyone’s views, with hours-long tautological debates about whether a draft article should use “a” or “the,” or “can” or “may” — and whether the English construction aptly translates to the analogous French.
I have been keeping a running journal of paper ideas sparked by these deep doctrinal discussions, as well as a record of the members’ dry diplomatic humor (for instance, a recurring joke about the “human right to break for Colombian coffee” every afternoon!).
My day-to-day involves taking notes on interventions made by the members, discussing divergent points of views with Professor Oral, and conducting doctrinal research to support her position in her statements, alongside her three other assistants. This involves using the research and writing skills I developed in my work as Professor Laurel Fletcher’s graduate student researcher, as well as my EU law class with Professor Katerina Linos in the spring.
Further, my work with the Human Rights Clinic last year, and conversations with my clinical supervisor Radhika Kapoor about the tension between global south states’ right to economic self-determination and their role as a denier of individual rights, have helped me recognize similar ideological currents in the commission’s debates
Roughly half the ILC members are scholars trained in and situated within the western legal academy; the other half are lawyer-diplomats from outside the west with experience in government practice. I have found that their voices often reflect the power imbalances and contradictions captured by critical approaches to international law.
One of the biggest moments of this session that animated some of these faultlines was the ILC’s adoption of its final work on the immunities of state officials from foreign criminal jurisdiction, after 18 years of charged debate.
Expert mentors
Another thing I have learned to appreciate is the lack of a clear line between public and private international law. ILC members, like Professor Oral, are equally knowledgeable in both, which lends currency to their specialized areas of practice.
I have also found that members possess deep knowledge of core legal doctrine, such as contract law, which is useful to their international work on compensation, state responsibility, and treaty interpretation. I am planning to spend my last year at Berkeley trying to relate my core doctrinal classes to analogous international legal doctrine and taking more classes in private international law — such as Disputes with Sovereigns with David Bowker and International Litigation and Arbitration with Neil Popovic.
The most valuable part of this summer is the relationships I have built. Professor Oral — one of only five women out of 34 ILC members, and one of few to have litigated before the ICJ, including representing Palestine in the Climate Change Advisory Opinion — is an extraordinary mentor, as are the other members who have been generous with their time, wisdom, and support.
In our third week here, Oxford Law Faculty member Dapo Akande, also the UK’s judicial candidate to the ICJ, organized a photo with Oxford students and alumni at the ILC — assistants, Secretariat, and members — for Oxford’s archives. I also discovered that a few other assistants are fellow Brown alumni, people I had studied alongside in college without meeting, who ended up in this position through different paths, driven by similar values and hopes.
To think that these fellow assistants — with whom I have swum in the pristine lakes of France and hiked in the glacial mountains of Switzerland — will some day become a co-agent or a judge I may appear before in the Hague is both sobering and thrilling. I will return to my 3L year with gratitude for these friendships and the dream that someday my full-time work will resemble this summer.