Jeremmy Okonjo

Assistant Professor

International Trade; Finance and Investments Law; Digital Economy; Technology

School of Law
S2.24, Social Sciences Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom

024 765 24937

Scholarship

Dr Jeremmy Okonjo’s research interests include international trade, finance, commercial and foreign investments law and regulation, technology, the digital economy, innovation law and policy, regulation, and climate finance law. He is interested in the role of digitalization and sustainability in the shaping of economic disciplines, including trade, finance and foreign investments.

Jeremmy is a member of various research networks and projects, including the International Economic Law (IEL) Collective, the Law and Development Research Network (LDRN), and the New Frontiers of Development Finance (NefDef), and Climate Finance Just Transition (CLiFT). He is also a member of the editorial advisory board of the journal of Financing for Development.

Jeremmy convenes and teaches the following modules:

International Economic Law (LLB and LLM)
International Economic Law of the Digital Economy (LLM)
Financial Services Regulation (UG)
International Sale of Goods Law (LLM)

He is interested in supervising doctoral research in international trade, finance and investments law, the digital economy, and technology.

Bio

Jeremmy joined Warwick Law School as Assistant Professor in 2021. Previously, he was a Lecturer of Law at Kent Law School (2017-2021), and a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (2019-2021) at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies (CCLS), Queen Mary University of London. Prior to joining academia, he practiced Law at Mwagambo & Okonjo Advocates, specializing in constitutional law, judicial review, human rights and election law litigation, and also commercial practice. He has represented Kenya’s constitutional commissions, including the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, and the National Land Commission, in tribunal and judicial hearings, and also individual judges in tribunal hearings before the Judges and Magistrates Vetting Board.

Jeremmy has also worked in policy and legal reform and advocacy. He advised Kenya’s Ministry of Justice on the redesign of the Governance, Justice, Law and Order Sector (GJLOS) reform program. In addition, as a member of the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA), he represented private sector governance concerns in various statutory and other governance forums. He has also contributed to World Bank publications, e.g. on benchmarking of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) policy and legislation.

Jeremmy holds a PhD Law degree from the University of Kent, LLM degrees from University College London (International Banking and Finance Law) and University of Nairobi ( Law, Governance and Democracy). He also holds a Post-graduate Diploma in Law (Advocates Training Program) from the Kenya School of Law, and a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) degree from the University of Nairobi. Jeremmy was admitted to the Roll of Advocates of the High Court of Kenya in 2011, and is also an Associate Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy.

Teaching Projects

Highlighted

New Frontiers in International Development Finance

The New Frontiers in International Development Finance (NeF DeF) project brings together research and policy thinking on the law, regulation and governance impacts of the shifting landscape of international development finance. Jeremmy leads the digital technologies thematic research stream, which examines the digitalization of development financing and development processes, and also the digitalization of governance and accountability frameworks of these development projects and processes. See more details at https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/research/projects/nef-def/.

The International Economic Law (IEL) Collective

The IEL Collective provides a space for critical reflection on the complex interactions in the growing field of international economic law and exploring how epistemological and methodological diversity in the discipline can contribute towards the development of a more holistic landscape of scholarship on law and the governance of the global economy. We aim to stimulate conversations about plurality, representation and criticality in researching, teaching and practising international economic law and spark new conversations about the future of the discipline. For more details, see https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/law/research/centres/globe/ielcollective/.

Impact

Policy

2023: Provided live evidence to the UK Business and Trade Commission on the on the future of the financial services sector in the UK and how the UK's trading relationships affect its regulatory environment.

2022: Member of the Expert Advisory Group of the Digital Transformation of Regulation programme on the Open Regulation Platform (ORP), in the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). The ORP is a government project that aims to create an enriched machine-readable dataset of business regulations that will then be released publicly.

2022 - Present: Member of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) United Kingdom working groups, including:

the Digital Economy Committee
the Banking Committee

2020: Policy Brief on Global Value Chains, Trade and Inequalities

Together with Professor Donatella Alessandrini, co-authored a policy brief aimed at trade law negotiators, policy makers and practitioners. The policy brief documented the findings of Professor Alessandrini’ s British Academy-funded project on ‘Global Value Chains (GVCs), trade and inequalities’ and a subsequent research workshop at Kent Law School. The research concluded that economic rewards within GVCs are unequally distributed between capital and labour, due to legal privileges international trade law and foreign investments law provide lead-firms with.

International Organisations

Contributed to the Kenya case study of the World Bank 2016 report "Benchmarking Public-Private Partnership Procurement: Assessing Government Capability to Prepare, Procure and Manage PPPs".

Contributed to the Kenya case study of the World Bank 2015 report "Benchmarking Public-Private Partnerships Procurement 2015 - A Pilot in 10 Economies".

Research Supervision