Dr Laura Mai joined the Amsterdam Centre for International Law in January 2026, with an NWO-funded Veni grant for her project Legal Geographies of Climate Change: Responsibility and Justice in Planetary Perspective. The project critically interrogates legally constructed geographies of climate change – from the local to the ‘planetary’ – to assess their implications for questions of responsibility and justice. 

Laura holds a PhD in Law from King’s College London and an LLM from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam, Laura worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She is a Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham in the UK and Associate Editor at Transnational Legal Theory. 

Outside of academia, Laura has worked in private legal practice in London, Brussels, and Hong Kong. She was appointed as a consultant for the UN Climate Change Secretariat, has advised climate NGOs in the UK and Germany, and provided expert evidence to the British Parliament’s All-Party Group on Climate Change.

Laura's expertise cuts across international and transnational climate change law and governance. She has investigated how governments, global city networks, financial institutions, philanthropic foundations, and digital infrastructure providers have become enrolled in the global effort to address climate change, in particular under the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

Laura's research has been published in leading international journals including the Leiden Journal of International Law, Transnational Environmental Law, Law, Innovation & Technology, Global Policy, and Global Environmental Politics (amongst others). She has also co-edited several volumes, including on Transnational Environmental Law in the Anthropocene (Routledge 2021) and A Research Agenda for Law, Finance and the Environment (Edward Elgar 2026). 

As an interdisciplinary socio-legal researcher, Laura has hands-on experience in applying multiple research methods, including doctrinal legal analysis and empirical research methods (archival work, interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic observations).

Laura is particularly interested in conceptual and theoretical questions for which she frequently draws on insights from political theory, phenomenology, the environmental humanities, and science and technology studies. 

A full overview of Laura's publications is available here.