On invitation by the Berlin Potsdam Research Group "The International Rule of Law: Rise or Decline?", Benedict Kingsbury, Vice Dean and Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and Faculty Director of the Guarini Institute for Global Legal Studies delivered the Thomas Franck Lecture on "Updating the International Law Endowment in the Era of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence".

The "international law endowment" is an important accreting resource in global ordering, tolerably resilient to the jolts of power shifts and discordant politics. Data-driven infrastructural power and deepening of artificial intelligence systems, arriving at the same time as planetary-scale anthropogenic challenges, pose challenges that require some transformation as well as adaptation. This lecture develops some proposals and considers their implications for the international law of the future.