About Us
Full-Time Faculty working in International Law
The following are short descriptions only. For more comprehensive biographies and contact details for NYU Law faculty, please visit the NYU Law site at http://www.law.nyu.edu/faculty
Affiliated faculty are also listed below.
Professor Philip Alston
John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law
Philip Alston’s scholarship and teaching focus primarily on human rights law and the law of international organizations. He directs the NYU Law Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and was previously Chairperson of the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1991-1998), and an independent expert appointed by the UN Secretary-General to advise on the future of human rights treaty monitoring arrangements (1989-1997). Alston served for more than 10 years as Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law, and is author of the casebook, International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics, Moral (with Henry J. Steiner and Ryan Goodman, 3rd ed., 2007). He is UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions.
Professor Jose Alvarez
Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law
Until moving to NYU he has been the Hamilton Fish Professor of International Law at Columbia Law School. José Alvarez is a prolific scholar of remarkable interdisciplinary breadth, and is regarded as one of the leading academics in international law. He teaches courses on international law, foreign investment, international legal theory, and global governance. From 2006-2008, Alvarez was the President of the American Society of International Law, and is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has served on the National Advisory Committee of the UN Financing Global Policy Project, and on the editorial or advisory boards of the American Journal of International Law, Journal of International Criminal Justice, Global Governance, and the Journal of International Law and International Relations. Prior to entering academia, José Alvarez was an attorney adviser with the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State where he worked on cases before the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, served on the negotiation teams for bilateral investment treaties and the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, and was legal adviser to the administration of justice program in Latin America coordinated by the Agency of International Development. Before that, he worked at Shea and Gardner in Washington, D.C. and clerked for Judge Thomas Gee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
Professor Vicki Been
Elihu Root Professor of Law and Professor of Public Policy
Professor Vicki Been has been at the cutting edge of legal scholarship at the intersection of land use and environmental law. Her recent work examines the Fifth Amendment prohibition against the taking of property in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and a growing number of other bilateral and multilateral investment agreements which include provisions requiring host-states to compensate foreign investors for any “expropriation” of their investments. She is the co-author of the leading land use casebook, Land Use Controls: Cases and Materials (with Robert Ellickson, 2000).
Professor Paul Chevigny
Joel S. and Anne B. Ehrenkranz Professor of Law Emeritus
Paul Chevigny is a human rights lawyer, who prior to joining the NYU faculty in 1977, worked for many years in association with the New York Civil Liberties Union, first as Director of the Police Practices Project and later as a staff attorney. Chevigny’s scholarship increasingly focuses on international human rights issues and international comparative work. He has focused in recent years on the problems of police violence in Third World cities, participating frequently in missions for Human Rights Watch, and is the principal author of three reports (Human Rights in Jamaica, Police Abuses in Brazil, and Police Violence in Argentina). Chevigny’s interests also have encompassed the theoretical and practical elements of the First Amendment freedom of expression, which he has analyzed as part of a group of dialogue rights. Professor Chevigny’s Clinic in International Human Rights is a popular selection at the Law School.
Professor
Stephen Choi
Murray and Kathleen Bring Professor of Law
Stephen Choi is a leading scholar of securities regulation. He has written on international securities markets issues, with a particular focus on sovereign bonds, sovereign default, and "odious debts". He is active in the Law School's initiatives in East and South-East Asia.
Professor Sujit Choudhry
Professor of Law
Sujit Choudhry principal areas of expertise are comparative constitutional law and Canadian constitutional law. Prior to NYU, he was an associate dean and Scholl Professor of Law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. He was also a Global Visiting Professor of Law at NYU Law in the fall of 2008. Choudhry provides constitutional advice to a broad range of public sector and private sector organizations, and is extensively involved in public policy development. Choudhry is widely considered to be one of the world's most renowned public-law scholars working in the area of comparative constitutional law and comparative constitutional development.
Professor Jerome Cohen
Professor of Law
Professor Jerome Cohen is the doyen of senior American experts on East Asian law. At Harvard and then since 1991 at NYU Law, he has helped pioneer the introduction of East Asian legal systems and perspectives into American legal curricula. He draws on his immense practical experience in Chinese law in courses, on international business contracts and economic cooperation with east Asia, Chinese law and society and comparative international law.
Professor Kevin Davis
Beller Family Professor of Business Law
Kevin Davis, who joined NYU from a professorship at the University of Toronto, works on commercial and financial law aspects of law and development and related issues of governance. He has particular expertise on Caribbean and small island economies and polities. Currently, he directs the IILJ's Financing Development Project. He is co-author of a major study of these issues with Michael Trebilcock (2005), and has also written an economic analysis of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.
Gráinne de Búrca
Professor of Law
Gráinne de Búrca focuses in her work on a wide range of topics related to E.U. law and policy, including doctrine, institutional design, and broad questions about the integration of the E.U. legal order with the international legal system. She co-authored the most widely used and influential E.U. law casebook for English-language courses in Europe, the U.K., and other countries. De Búrca has written more than 50 scholarly articles and book chapters as well, and co-edits Oxford University Press’s series Oxford Monographs in European Law. She sits on the editorial board of the European Law Journal, and on the editorial and advisory boards of numerous other journals.
Professor Rochelle Dreyfuss
Pauline Newman Professor of Law
Professor Dreyfuss’s research and teaching interests include intellectual property, privacy, the relationship between science and law, and civil procedure. She has authored several articles on these subjects and has co-authored casebooks on civil procedure and intellectual property law.
Previously a consultant to the Presidential Commission on Catastrophic Nuclear Accidents, Professor Dreyfuss today leads an American Law Institute project on principles to guide multinational civil litigation in intellectual property disputes.
Professor Franco Ferrari
Professor of Law
Executive Director,
Center for Transnational Litigation and Commercial Law
Professor Franco Ferrari is chaired professor of international law at Verona University School of Law. Previously, he was chaired professor of comparative law at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Bologna University in Italy. After serving as member of the Italian Delegation to various sessions of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) from 1995 to 2000, he served as Legal Officer at the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs, International Trade Law Branch (2000-2002), with responsibility for numerous projects, including the preparation of the UNCITRAL Digest on Applications of the UN Sales Convention. Professor Ferrari has published more than 180 law review articles in various languages and 12 books in the areas of international commercial law, conflict of laws, comparative law and international commercial arbitration. Professor Ferrari is a member of the editorial board of various peer reviewed European law journals (Internationales Handelsrecht, European Review of Private Law, Contratto e impresa, Contratto e impresa/Europa, Revue de droit des affaires internationales); Professor Ferrari also acts as an international arbitrator.
Professor Eleanor Fox
Walter J. Derenberg Professor of Trade Regulation
Eleanor Fox is a globally recognized antitrust and comparative competition law scholar. Her recent work addresses issues at the intersection of international trade and competition, and includes articles that explore the disjuncture between national law and global markets. She recently served as a member of the International Competition Policy Advisory Committee to the U.S. Attorney General.
Clayton P. Gillette
Max E. Greenberg Professor of Contract Law
Clayton Gillette teaches and writes in the area of international commercial law. He is particularly interested in the relationship between the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and the Uniform Commercial Code.
He is the author of casebooks on Local Government Law (with Lynn Baker) and Payment Systems and Credit Instruments (with Alan Schwartz and Robert Scott), and a textbook on Municipal Debt Finance Law (with Robert S. Amdursky). Gillette's numerous articles include major studies of long-term commercial contracts.
Professor Ryan Goodman (from Fall 2009)
Professor of Law
Professor Ryan Goodman will also be an associated member of the Department of Sociology and an affiliated member of the Department of Politics at NYU. A leading academic in the areas of international human rights law, public international law, and international relations, Professor Goodman utilizes his theoretical depth in the social sciences to yield important insights for the design of international law and institutions. He is currently the Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and Director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School. Prior to joining the Harvard Law School faculty, Ryan Goodman clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has worked at the U.S. Department of State, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and nongovernmental organizations in India, South Africa, Switzerland, Thailand, and the United States. He is also a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University.
Professor David Golove
Hiller Family Foundation Professor of Law
Professor David Golove has secured a reputation as one of the most original and promising scholars in constitutional law. His recent scholarship addresses core constitutional questions arising from foreign relations law and the exercise of the US Treaty-making power. His book-length article for the Michigan Law Review, "Treaty-Making and the Nation: The Historical Foundations of the Nationalist Conception of the Treaty Power," is a major work of legal historical scholarship and an important legal and constitutional defense of federal power. Professor Golove is a member of the faculty Executive Committee of the NYU Law School Institute for International Law and Justice and Director of the JD-LLM Program in International Law.
Professor Stephen Holmes
Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law
Stephen Holmes is a specialist on constitutional law and legal reform in Eastern Europe and Russia. His research centers on the history of European liberalism and the challenges posed by economic liberalization and the establishment of democratic governance after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, addressing democratic and constitutional theory as it relates to postsocialist legal reform in the region and the origins of the welfare state. He directs the NYU Law Center for Russian and East European Law and is Editor-in-Chief of East European Constitutional Review, a journal that tracks the constitutional development of the region through quarterly offerings of academic articles, roundtables, and symposia by regional and foreign scholars. His latest work focuses on evaluation and critique of efforts by international institutions such as the World Bank to promote “rule of law” in transitional and developing countries, and on the global implications of antiterrorism measures.
Professor Robert Howse
Lloyd C. Nelson Professor of International Law
Director, Institute for International Law and Justice
Robert Howse joined the permanent faculty in 2008 from the University of Michigan. A leading scholar of the law of the World Trade Organization, he is co-author of one of the leading textbooks and several important articles on connections of trade with labor, environment, human rights, and climate change. He also teaches international investment law, global financial architecture, and the history and theory of international law.
Professor Mitchell Kane
Professor of Law
Mitchell Kane joined the permanent faculty in 2008 from the University of Virginia. Widely regarded as one of the most gifted young scholars in International Tax, he is increasingly working on connections between tax regimes and international development initiatives. He draws on finance and tax policy in major papers on "Strategy and Cooperation in National Responses to International Tax Arbitrage" and "Corporate Taxation and International Charter Competition."
Professor Benedict Kingsbury
Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law
Director (on leave), Institute for International Law and Justice
Fellow, Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice, 2009-10
Professor Benedict Kingsbury is a highly-regarded international law scholar, whose theoretically-grounded approach to international law closely integrates legal theory, political theory (including international relations theory), and history. Professor Kingsbury is the Director of the Institute for International Law and Justice at NYU School of Law and also directs the Law School’s new Program in the History and Theory of International Law as well as the
IILJ's Global Administrative Law Project.
Professor Mattias Kumm
Professor of Law
Professor Mattias Kumm is an international and comparative law scholar, who has developed an innovative theory of the relations between national and international law. Drawing on and expanding the scope of liberal democratic constitutional theory, Professor Kumm asks under what conditions national courts should enforce supranational laws, even when they conflict with national law. This involves a thorough reassessment of some core concepts of the liberal constitutional tradition, including state sovereignty, democracy, and the rule of law. Professor Kumm is a member of the faculty Executive Committee of the NYU Law School Institute for International Law and Justice.
Professor Andreas Lowenfeld
Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law
Professor Lowenfeld’s extraordinary body of work traverses public and private international law. His recent writing include works on transborder kidnapping, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) disputes, liability of airlines for disasters caused by terrorism, economic sanctions, and the enforcement of foreign judgments. Professor Lowenfeld is frequently an arbitrator in international disputes, public and private and has argued a number of important Supreme Court cases concerning international law, arbitration, and jurisdiction. Along with Professor Linda Silberman, Professor Lowenfeld is a reporter for the American Law Institute International Jurisdiction and Judgments Project, aimed at the development of federal legislation to govern the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in US courts.
Professor Theodor Meron
Charles L. Denison Professor of Law Emeritus and Judicial Fellow
Professor Meron, a renowned authority on human rights and humanitarian law, is currently on leave to serve as a Judge on the International Criminal Court for Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. A prominent authority also in general international law, he was until recently Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law. He has published numerous books addressing issues as diverse as “Investment Insurance in International Law” and “War and Chivalry in Shakespeare”.
Professor Geoffrey P. Miller
Stuyvesant P. Comfort Professor of Law
Director, Center for the Study of Central Banks
Geoffrey Miller is the author or editor of five books and over one hundred articles in such diverse fields as financial institutions, corporate and securities law, constitutional law, civil procedure, legal history, jurisprudence, and ancient law. He has taught a wide range of subjects including property, federal regulation of banking, land development, securities, financial institutions, the legal profession, and legal theory and is an expert in global banking regulation. Miller received his B. A.magna cum laude from Princeton in 1973 and his J.D. from Columbia in 1978, where he was editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review. At the University of Chicago, Miller served as Kirkland & Ellis Professor, Director of the Program in Law and Economics, editor of the Journal of Law and Economics, and Associate Dean. Miller is Director of the Center for the Study of Central Banks, a research institution focusing on the law and economics of central banks and international bank regulation.
Professor Smita Narula
Associate Professor of Clinical Law
Before joining NYU, Smita Narula spent six years at Human Rights Watch, working on India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh. She has conducted numerous human rights investigations in Asia on topics such as: bonded child labor; abuses related to the HIV/AIDS epidemic; caste discrimination; state-sponsored massacres; the marginalization of religious minorities; gender-based violence; and violations of the right to education. She teaches the International Human Rights Clinic, and works also on responsibilities and accountability of multinational corporations in relation to human rights.
Professor Burt Neuborne
Inez Milholland Professor of Civil Liberties
Legal Director, Brennan Center for Justice
For 30 years, Professor Neuborne has been one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers, serving as National Legal Director of the ACLU, Special Counsel to the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, and as a member of the New York City Human Rights Commission. At the same time, Professor Neuborne has forged a national reputation as a constitutional scholar and teacher. He has worked on several transnational human rights cases, including arrangements for payments to victims of torture under the Marcos regime in the Philippines, and is well-known for his central role in a series of recent cases against banks, insurance companies and industrial corporations related to the Nazi Holocaust.
Professor Samuel Rascoff
Assistant Professor of Law
Samuel Rascoff worked in the New York City Police Department as Director of the Intelligence Division before joining the permanent faculty in 2008. A summa cum laude from Harvard University with an A.B. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, he went to Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, where he earned a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics with first class honors, then returned to the US for law school and a U.S. Supreme Court clerkship with Justice David Souter. He served as a Special Assistant to the Office of Secretary of Defense and Coalition Provisional Authority in Washington and Baghdad, and worked on complex litigation as an associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. A member of the Advisory Board of the NYU Center on Law and Security, he speaks Arabic and Hebrew, and reads Persian, French, and Spanish.
Professor Cristina Rodriguez
Associate Professor of Law
Cristina Rodriguez's current research focuses on language rights in the US and other countries. She has published several articles in this area, including "Accommodating Linguistic Difference: Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Language Rights in the United States," Harvard Law Review (2001). She has also done graduate work in History, and published "Clearing the Smoke-Filled Room: Women Jurors and the Disruption of an Old Boys' Network in Nineteenth-Century America," Yale Law Journal (1999).
Professor Margaret Satterthwaite
Associate Professor of Clinical Law
Faculty Director, Root-Tilden-Kern Program
After receiving her law degree from NYU in 1999, Meg Satterthwaite clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She then worked at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, focusing on emergency law and collusion in Northern Ireland, and thereafter clerked at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, before returning to New York to work with the human rights section of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). She returned full-time to NYU in 2003, teaching the International Human Rights Clinic. Her research interests include human rights in the "war on terror"; gender, sexuality and human rights; and the human rights of migrants. She a member of the Board of Directors of Amnesty International USA.
Professor Linda Silberman
Martin Lipton Professor of Law
Professor Silberman's early articles on US federal magistrate judges and special masters are considered the authoritative works in the field. More recently, her writing in the area of international child abduction led to her service as expert consultant to the Hague Conference on Private International Law to review the operation of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, and subsequently as a member of the United States delegation. She is Co-Reporter (with Professor Andreas Lowenfeld) of an American Law Institute Project on International Jurisdiction and Judgments, directed to the development of federal legislation to govern the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments in US courts.
Professor Bryan Stevenson
Professor of Clinical Law
Professor Bryan Stevenson is recognized as one of the nation’s top public interest lawyers and has written extensively on criminal justice, capital punishment, and civil rights issues. In recent years Professor Stevenson has become increasingly involved in international human rights issues. He has advised lawyers and provided assistance throughout the Caribbean in death penalty cases and is currently working with European human rights organizations on the application of international law to the US death penalty and on the intersection between European economic interests and human rights in the US
Professor Richard B. Stewart
University Professor
John Edward Sexton Professor of Law
Chair and Faculty Director, Hauser Global Law School Program
Director, Center for Environmental and Land Use Law
Recognized as one of the world's leading scholars in environmental and administrative law, Professor Richard Stewart has published eight books and more than 70 articles in this area. His writing has been influential in shifts to the recognition of the value of markets in strengthening environmental protection, rather than the command and control regulation that was long the only model. Professor Stewart directs the school's Center on Environmental and Land Use Law, which sponsors research, conferences, and publications on cutting-edge issues of environmental and land use law. The Hauser Global Law School Program and the IILJ's Global Administrative Law Project are also under his direction. He is the author of important works on the use of tradable permits to increase the efficiency of controls on global climate change and co-directs a major research project on genetically modified organisms.
Professor Frank Upham
Wilf Family Professor of Property Law
Frank Upham oversees, with his own mentor, Jerome Cohen, a growing program in East Asian law. Author of an acclaimed book on law and social change in Japan, Upham’s scholarship increasingly focuses on global law and development issues, including the roles of lawyers in social change. He directs NYU’s pioneering LLM in Global Public Service Law, which attracts outstanding students from all over the world.
Professor Joseph Weiler
University Professor
Joseph Straus Professor of Law
European Union Jean Monnet Chaired Professor
Director, J.S.D. Program
Director, Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law and Justice
Professor Joseph Weiler’s influential body of scholarship traverses European Union law, international and regional trade law and international legal and political theory. He served as a member of the Committee of Jurists of the Institutional Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, co-drafting the European Parliament's Declaration of Human Rights and Freedoms, and was a member of the Groupe des Sages advising the Commission of the European Union on the Amsterdam Treaty. Recently he was part of a group advising on the European Commission White Paper on Governance. He handed over the Global Law School Program to Dick Stewart's directorship in 2007, and then became editor of two leading journals in the field, the European Journal of International Law (EJIL), and the International Journal of Constitutional Law (I-Con).
Professor Jeremy Waldron
University Professor
Professor Katrina Wyman
Professor of Law
Professor Wyman is a graduate of the University of Toronto and Yale Law School. Her research focuses on regulatory and market-based approaches to reducing atmospheric pollution and to fisheries management. Her teaching interests include international environmental law and international fisheries law.
Professor Sally Merry
Professor of Anthropology (Institute for Law and Society), Faculty of Arts and Science
Sally Engle Merry, a leading anthropologist with a particular focus on tensions between legal pluralism and claims to universality of human rights, is Professor of Anthropology and Law and Society at NYU. She is one of the leaders of the IILJ's project on Indicators as a Means of Global Governance. Among her many books are Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton University Press, 2000). Her law school courses include The Anthropology of Human Rights.
