Lauri Mälksoo

Lauri Mälksoo (born 28 January 1975) is an Estonian legal scholar specialising in international law. He is professor of international law and head of the Department of Public Law at the University of Tartu, and has been a member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences since 2013. He is also a member of the Institut de Droit International, the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Mälksoo is known for scholarship on the legal continuity of the Baltic states, Russian approaches to international law, and Russia's relationship with European human-rights law.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]}

Mälksoo was educated at Abja Secondary School. He received his law degree from the University of Tartu in 1998, an LL.M. from Georgetown University in 1999, and a doctorate in law from Humboldt University of Berlin in 2002.^[2][3][6] His doctoral dissertation, on the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union and the doctrine of state continuity, was later reworked into his first monograph.^[2][8]

Mälksoo taught at the University of Tartu from the late 1990s and became professor of international law in 2009; in 2016 he became head of the university's Department of Public Law.^[1][2] He has held research or visiting positions at New York University School of Law, the University of Tokyo, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and the Institut d'études avancées in Paris.^[3][6][7] He has served as an Estonian member of the Venice Commission since 2021 and as a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration since 2016.^[4][9][5]

In 2009 Mälksoo became the first researcher based in Estonia to receive a European Research Council Starting Grant. The project, International Law and Non-liberal States: The Doctrine and Application of International Law in the Russian Federation, examined how Russia's increasingly non-liberal political order affected its doctrine and practice of international law.^[10][11][12]

His first major book, Illegal Annexation and State Continuity: The Case of the Incorporation of the Baltic States by the USSR (2003; revised 2nd edition, 2022), examined the doctrine of non-recognition and the legal continuity of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania under Soviet rule and after restored independence.^[8][13] The book was reviewed in the American Journal of International Law, and the revised edition in the Journal of Baltic Studies.^[14][15]

Mälksoo's Russian Approaches to International Law (2015) surveyed tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet legal thinking on international law, with particular attention to sovereignty, empire, and claims of Russian civilizational distinctiveness.^[16] The book received scholarly reviews in the European Journal of International Law, the Polish Yearbook of International Law, and the Asian Journal of International Law.^[17][18][19] In 2016 it received an honorable mention for the Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.^[20]

Mälksoo later co-edited Russia and the European Court of Human Rights: The Strasbourg Effect (2017), a collection on Russia's engagement with the European Court of Human Rights and European human-rights law.^[21] The volume was reviewed in Human Rights Review.^[22]

Mälksoo was elected to the Estonian Academy of Sciences in 2013.^[2] In 2017 he received the Estonian National Science Award in social sciences for his research on Russian approaches to international law and human rights.^[23] The same year he received the Prize of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities donated by the Peregrinus Foundation, awarded to scholars from Eastern and Southeastern Europe for outstanding academic achievement.^[24][25] In 2026 the president of Estonia awarded him the Order of the White Star, 3rd Class.^[26]

• Mälksoo, Lauri (2003). Illegal Annexation and State Continuity: The Case of the Incorporation of the Baltic States by the USSR. Leiden; Boston: Martinus Nijhoff. ISBN 9041121773.
• Mälksoo, Lauri (2008). Rahvusvaheline õigus Eestis: ajalugu ja poliitika. Tallinn: Juura. ISBN 9789985752623.
• Mälksoo, Lauri (2015). Russian Approaches to International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198723042.
• Mälksoo, Lauri; Benedek, Wolfgang, eds. (2017). Russia and the European Court of Human Rights: The Strasbourg Effect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108415736.