This blog provides a brief reflection on the recent International Society of Public Law (also known as ICONS) annual conference in New Zealand and, in particular, the number of Pacific participants. The society is the worlds largest and leading learned society for all areas of public law and this was its first conference in the Pacific region.

The conference held at the Law Faculty of the Victoria University of Wellington from 3 to 5 July 2023 gathered judges, scholars, practitioners and researchers from more than 60 countries. More than 430 people attended more than 150 seminars over three days.

The discipline of public law generally covers any area of law that concerns public interests such as international law, constitutional law, human rights, environment and climate law and their interactions with public institutions such as international agencies, courts and government bodies. Public law considerations are cross-disciplinary with other social science and science disciplines such as political theory, anthropology and technology. All these were showcased at the conference.

This years theme was Islands and Ocean: Public Law in a Plural World. The theme was chosen to partly frame public law within a region of islands and ocean the Pacific and how disciplines of public law have and could respond to the various challenges it faces.

The Pacific states are a plural legal world where customs and traditions, adopted Western legal systems, and international law intertwine and at times collide. The theme could not be more appropriate for the region. Many of the seminars had strong relevance to the Pacific in either resonating with or raising different perspectives on current issues such as global climate justice; environmental harm; indigenous governance; economic, social and cultural rights; plurinationalism; democratic constitutionalism; and judicial governance.

There were six participants from the Pacific who presented on various aspects of Pacific law and society: Justice Dr Vergil Narokobi, Papua New Guinea Supreme Court; Associate Professor Tamasailau Suaalii, University of Auckland; Professor Brian Tamanaha, Washington University; Richard Naidu, lawyer, Fiji; Dr Mele Tupou Vaitohi, Victoria University of Wellington; and...

JAKARTA Male orangutans that resettle to a new area appear to be imitating the behavior of local individuals in an effort to survive and find a future home range, a new study says. Male orangutans that have reached sexual maturity tend to leave their birthplace and migrate to find a new home where they will adopt different skills of foraging, a group of researchers from universities in Germany, France and Indonesia reported in their recently published paper in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. Theyve dubbed the behavior learning skill as peering and described it as when migrant male orangutans intensively observe over a period of time a certain local they have chosen as a role model. Over the last few years, we have gained a pretty good understanding of observational social learning in immature orangutans and other primates so far, Julia Mrchen, a Ph.D. candidate at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany, who is the lead author of the paper, told Mongabay in an email interview. However, natural learning in adult primates in the wild remains largely uninvestigated. An unflanged migrant orangutan male feeding on leaves from a tree fern, Akar Pakis Sarang Burung (Drynaria sparsisora). Orangutan species Pongo abelii, Image courtesy of Julia Mrchen for SUAQ Project. Our results provide evidence that in general adult male orangutans are able to learn and update their already learned knowledge repertoires, when they are confronted with a new and unknown ecology, she said. Previous researchThis article was originally published on Mongabay