Bio
Rosa Brooks
Rosa Brooks is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, where she teaches courses on international law, failed states, atrocity law, and other subjects. She also serves as a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.
Brooks returned in July 2011 from a two year public service leave of absence, during which she served as Counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy. During her time at the Defense Department, Brooks also founded the Office for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy, and also led a major overhaul of the Defense Department's strategic communication and information operations effforts. In July 2011, she received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service.
From 2005-2009, Brooks was a weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and served as faculty director of GULC's Human Rights Institute. In 2006-2007, Brooks served as as Special Counsel to the President at the Open Society Institute in New York. From 2001-2006, she was an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she taught human rights law, constitutional law, and criminal law.
Brooks has also served as a senior advisor at the US Department of State, a consultant for Human Rights Watch, a fellow at the Carr Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, a board member of Amnesty International USA, a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a lecturer at Yale Law School, a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Fragile States, the board of the National Security Network and the Steering Committee of the White Oak Foreign Policy Leaders Project.
In addition to her popular writing, Brooks has written numerous scholarly articles on international law, failed states, post-conflict reconstruction and the rule of law, human rights, terrorism and the law of war.
Her book, Can Might Make Rights? The Rule of Law After Military Interventions, (with Jane Stromseth and David Wippman) was published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press. Her government and NGO work has involved field research in Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Israel, Palestine, Kosovo, China, Russia, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and Sierra Leone, among other places.
Brooks received her A.B. from Harvard in 1991 (history and literature), followed by a master's degree from Oxford in 1993 (social anthropology) and a law degree from Yale in 1996.
Ian Hurd
Ian Hurd is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. His research is on the interaction between states and international rules, norms, and laws. He has projects in international relations theory, international law, research methods, and international organizations.
His current project is about the law and politics of rule-violation in the international system. It begins with the gaps between what countries agree to in international law and what they do in practice. These gaps represent non-compliance but are also the location for interpretation, contestation, and politics. The book looks at international laws on humanitarian intervention, preemptive war, the use of force, and torture to see the productive aspects of non-compliance.
He also has recent articles on the law of humanitarian intervention, changing practices of diplomacy, the international whaling regime, and IR methodology. These reflects interests in both the theory and the practice of international politics.
His most recent book is International Organizations: Politics, Law, Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which examines the legal foundations of the main international organizations in the world today. It shows how the political impact of international organizations is a function of their legal structures, but also that the law and politics are these organizations must be understood together. It considers the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Union, the African Union, ASEAN, the ICJ, and the ICC.
Past work has been on the International Criminal Court treaty, Security Council reform at the United Nations, the concept of legitimacy in international relations, labor standards and international criminal law, as well as the constructivist school of thought in IR theory.
Ian Hurd is on the editorial board of the Journal of International Organization Studies and is an affiliated scholar at the Center on Law and Globalization at the University of Illinois and the American Bar Foundation. His book After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the UN Security Council won the Chadwick Alger award and the Myres McDougal Prize in 2008. He taught at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1999-2001, and in 2010-11 was a visiting fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. In 2011, he taught in the Cosmopolitanism course at the European Inter-University Center Venice School of Human Rights.
Patricia O'Brien
Patricia O’ Brien was appointed the Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and UN Legal Counsel in August 2008. She oversees the Office of Legal Affairs, the overall objectives of which are to provide a unified central legal service for the United Nations. The Office of Legal Affairs, which is based at the UN Headquarters in New York, employs approximately 200 staff of more than 60 different nationalities.
Ms. O’Brien has extensive experience of legal and international affairs. Prior to her appointment she held a number of senior legal positions in and out of Ireland. Immediately before taking up her position at the UN she served for five years as Legal Adviser to the Department of Foreign Affairs of Ireland where she advised on legal issues arising in Irish foreign policy, in particular public international law, human rights law and European Union law. She also served as a Senior Legal Adviser to the Attorney General of Ireland and as Legal Counsellor at the Irish Permanent Representation to the European Union in Brussels.
Earlier in her career Ms. O’Brien practiced law at the Irish Bar (1979-1988) and for one year at the Bar of British Columbia, Canada. Between 1989 and 1992 she held academic positions at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
Ms. O’Brien earned a Bachelor of Arts (Mod) in legal science in 1978 and a Master of Arts in 1987 from Trinity College, Dublin; a Barrister-at-Law (BL) from Kings Inns, Dublin, in 1978 and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Ottawa, Canada, in 1990. She is a member of the Irish Bar (1978) and of the Bar of England and Wales (1986). She is a Fellow of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, Vice-President of the Dublin University Law Society, and an Honorary Bencher of the Kings Inns, Dublin, and a Master of the Bench of the Middle Temple, London.
Ms. O’Brien has three children.
Anne Orford
Anne Orford is the holder of the Michael D. Kirby Chair of International Law and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at Melbourne Law School. She researches in the fields of international law, international legal theory, international legal history, international law and development, international economic law, and international law and security. She was the Foundation Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at Melbourne Law School from 2005 to 2012. Her major publications include International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (CUP, 2011) , the edited collection International Law and its Others (CUP, 2006) and Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law (CUP, 2003). She was awarded a research-only Australian Professorial Fellowship by the Australian Resarch Council to undertake a project on Cosmopolitanism and the Future of International Law from 2007 to 2011, and has been awarded a research-only Future Fellowship by the Australian Research Council to undertake a project entitled From Famine to Food Security: The Role of International Law from 2012 to 2015. Orford has been the Torgny Segerstedt Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg (2011-12), a Visiting Professor at Lund University (2011, 2007, 2005), a core faculty member of the IGLP Workshop on Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School (2011), a Senior Emile Noel Research Fellow at New York University (2003), and has lectured in the Cornell Law and Humanities Colloquium (2008), the NYU Institute for International Law and Justice Colloquium (2005), the Helsinki Summer Seminar on International Law (2012, 2004), and the Academy of European Law (1998). She will be awarded an honorary doctorate from Lund University in May 2012.
W. Michael Reisman
W. Michael Reisman is Myres S. McDougal Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, where he has been on the faculty since 1965. He has been a visiting professor in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Berlin, Basel, Paris, and Geneva. He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and a former member of its Executive Council. He is the President of the Arbitration Tribunal of the Bank for International Settlements.
Professor Reisman has published widely in the area of international law and he has served as arbitrator and counsel in many international cases. His most recent books are Foreign Investment Disputes: Cases, Materials and Commentary (with Bishop and Crawford); and International Law in Contemporary Perspective (with Arsanjani, Wiessner & Westerman). Professor Reisman received his LL.B. from Hebrew University and his LL.M. and J.S.D from Yale.
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Encyclopædia Britannica Article
- international law
Body of legal rules, norms, and standards that apply between sovereign states and other entities that are legally recognized as international actors. The term was coined by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Important elements of international law include sovereignty, recognition (which allows a country to honour the claims of another), consent (which allows for modifications in international agreements to fit the customs of a country), freedom of the high seas, self-defense (which ensures that measures may be taken against illegal acts committed against a sovereign country), freedom of commerce, and protection of nationals abroad. International courts, such as the International Court of Justice, resolve disputes on these and other matters, including war crimes. See also asylum; immunity.
- international law on britannica.com
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