As a master’s degree student at Hull University in the late 1980s I was looking for a suitable dissertation topic. My supervisor, David Freestone, told me of a conference that Hazel Fox was organising at the British Institute of International & Comparative Law (BIICL), on the then little-known concept of joint development as applied to mainly bilateral co-operative agreements between states extracting offshore oil and gas from common deposits on a shared basis.
From it emerged a model agreement for joint development, ably drafted by Hazel and her small research team, that helped avoid conflicts in an area beset by strongly held views of national sovereignty. With characteristic generosity, she invited me to the conference for nothing.
