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Rethinking the Role of International Organizations
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Speaker: Ruth Wedgwood, Professor; Yale University |
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Ruth Wedgwood has been Professor of International Law at Yale Law School since 1986, and writes on the use of force, peacekeeping, international tribunals, Security Council politics, international crimes, and American foreign affairs power. Ms. Wedgwood is also Senior Fellow for International Organizations and Law at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the incoming Director of Studies at the Hague Academy for International Law in the Netherlands. On her sabbatical this year, she is serving as the Edward Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of former SAIS Dean Paul Wolfowitz, currently serving as Deputy Secretary of Defense. She is also a guest scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Since 1994, she has convened the United Nations Roundtable at the Council on Foreign Relations, for ongoing discussions among senior members of the U.N. Secretariat, the U.N. diplomatic community (including members of the Security Council), non-governmental organizations, and the business and academic communities on foreign policy and legal issues arising from crises in Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Iraq, and control of chemical and biological weapons and nuclear proliferation, as well as the reform of the operations of the United Nations. She has visited and conducted research on the international law and policy problems arising in U.N. and regional peacekeeping operations and civil reconstruction efforts in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Haiti, East Timor, and Georgia. She recently guest-edited a symposium on POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION in the January 2001 issue of the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW, and has just returned from conducting a training session under the aegis of the Swedish government for Serbian judges, prosecutors and defense counsel interested in national war crimes trials. She is a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law, and was appointed by Secretary of Defense William Cohen to the National Security Study Group of the Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security in the 21st Century. In 1998-1999, she served as the Charles H. Stockton Professor of International Law at the U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. She is on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law, and serves as chairman of Research and Studies for the American Society of International Law. She is also a member of the policy advisory group of the United Nations Association (USA), a former board member of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and was recently appointed to the board of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security (LAWS). She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the World Policy Journal of the New School University. Professor Wedgwood is a graduate of Harvard University (magna cum laude) and Yale Law School. She served as the executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and was awarded the Peres Prize for the finest writing in the journal. She also studied economics at the London School of Economics as a Harvard prize fellow. Professor Wedgwood is the editor of AFTER DAYTON: LESSONS OF THE BOSNIAN PEACE PROCESS and was study director of the CFR task force report on AMERICAN NATIONAL INTEREST AND THE UNITED NATIONS, which has been widely distributed in the American foreign policy community. She co-directed a United Nations symposium for the Council on issues arising under the law of the sea, entitled SECURITY FLASHPOINTS: OIL, ISLANDS, SEA ACCESS, AND MILITARY CONFRONTATION. She is a former law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court and Judge Henry J. Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She is also Vice-President of the International Law Association, American Branch. From 1980-1986, she was Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where she was chief counsel in the espionage prosecution of a Bulgarian trade attaché, leading to negotiations for the release of Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky. She also headed investigations of the transshipment of war materiel to North Korea, the Soviet Union, Iran and Iraq, as well as domestic terrorism involving the planned bombings of federal facilities, public corruption in the federal WIC food program and the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, and landlord arson that destroyed low-income housing in New York City. From 1978-80, she served as chief of staff for the head of the criminal division in the U.S. Department of Justice and as head of the Attorney General-FBI joint working group to frame guidelines for the investigative use of informants and undercover operations. She also devised trial procedures to permit espionage prosecutions without prejudice to national security information, later incorporated in the classified information procedures act. She was also a summer associate of the law firm of Covington and Burling, and has consulted with Simpson, Thacher and Bartlett, as well as other firms. Professor Wedgwood has been involved in the attempt to negotiate a compromise to protect U.S. interests under the Rome treaty for an International Criminal Court and the Protocol of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. She has served as amicus curiae for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague. Her scholarly essays have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the American Journal of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, the European Journal of International Law, and the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, among others. Her popular essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Financial Times, and Christian Science Monitor, and she comments occasionally on CNN and National Public Radio. Related Readings:
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Last Updated: 01/03/2002