Friday, April 18th, 2008
Ropes Gray Room, Pound Hall
Harvard Law School
The 2008 Harvard International Law Journal Symposium is made possible through the Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy Fund
Schedule
Friday, April 18th, 2008
12:00pm – Panel I: Comparative Constitutional Perspectives
Ropes Gray Room, Pound Hall
Irwin Cotler, Member of Parliament & Former Minister of Justice, Canada
Noah Feldman, Professor, Harvard Law School
Taghrid Hikmet, Justice, High Criminal Court of Jordan
Frank Michelman, Professor, Harvard Law School (Moderator)
2:00pm – Remarks by Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan
Ropes Gray Room, Pound Hall
2:15pm – Panel II: The U.S. Constitution & International Law
Ropes Gray Room, Pound Hall
Sarah Cleveland, Professor, Columbia Law School
David Golove, Professor, NYU Law School
Edwin Kneedler, Deputy Solicitor General, U.S. Solicitor General’s Office
John McGinnis, Professor, Northwestern Law School
Ernest Young, Professor, Duke Law School
Mark Tushnet, Professor, Harvard Law School (Moderator)
4:15pm – Panel III: Approaches to Human Rights: International Law and Constitutionalism
Ropes Gray Room, Pound Hall
Laurence Helfer, Professor, Vanderbilt Law School
Mattias Kumm, Professor, NYU Law School
Gerald Neuman, Professor, Harvard Law School
Anne Peters, Professor, University of Basel
Ran Hirschl, Professor, University of Toronto (Moderator)
6:15pm – Wine & Cheese Reception
John Chipman Gray Room, Pound Hall
Panel Descriptions
Panel I: Comparative Constitutional Perspectives
Drafters of new constitutions face many difficult choices in fasioning stable political and legal institutions. These choices are more trying in the context of ethnic conflict, in which there is a heightened need to achieve domestic public legitimacy while meeting international demands. Iraq and Afghanistan present compelling examples of nascent constitutions forged with the input of the international community and against the backdrop of ethnic conflict. The Afghan Constitution stresses the state’s commitment to international law and human rights norms while maintaining deference to established Islamic shari’a and empowering the Supreme Court to review international treaties and covenants. Similarly, concern exists that the Iraqi Constitution, with its requirement that international treaties to which Iraq is a signatory not contradict Islam, enables Iraq to limit its international obligations. Do these new constitutions merely pay lip service to international law, or do they ensure an important role for international law in each country’s domestic legal hierarchy?
A constitutional issue frequently arising in ethnic conflict situations is the legal treatment of hate speech. Accordingly, hate speech offers an instructive case study for how constitutional and international law have been used to respond to ethnic tensions. In Kosovo and East Timor, the U.N. sought to address human rights issues, and hate speech in particular, within the legislative frameworks established in those new states. Yet even in countries as ostensibly similar as Canada and the United States, hate law jurisprudence highlights the different ways in which countries have balanced constitutional and international law. In its pioneering Mugesera case, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the deportation of a Rwandan politician widely considered to have sparked the Rwandan genocide with his hateful public speeches. In so holding, the Court helped cement the ill-defined crime of incitement to genocide, and aligned Canadian provisions regarding crimes against humanity with international law. This result raises important questions about hate speech in other modern contexts, such as whether the remarks of Iranian President Ahmadinejad, suggesting that Israel be “wiped off the map,” are justiciable in an international law context.
By focusing on these different perspectives on the interaction of domestic constitutions and international law in the context of ethnic tensions, this panel seeks to explore ways in which these tensions have been managed (or mismanaged) across countries with different legal systems, histories, values, degrees of development, and ethnic compositions.
Panel II: The U.S. Constitution and International Law
Although the debate over how international law ought to interact with the U.S. Constitution is longstanding, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing war on terror have shone new light on this well-worn question. Prosecuting the war on terror while abiding by international standards has proven to be a difficult and controversial balancing act—one characterized not by the unidirectional influence of international law on constitutional norms, but rather by a rich and complex interchange between the two. In recent years, several important questions have been brought to bear, including the extent to which the Constitution binds the U.S. to norms of international law, the extent to which international law acts as a constraint on domestic legislation or on Presidential powers, and the extent to which the U.S. Constitution should be understood as incorporating norms of global, in addition to domestic, justice.
No better are these simmering tensions exemplified than in the Supreme Court’s recent Medellin v. Texas decision and in the pending Iraq and Guantánamo habeas corpus cases.
In Medellin, the Court held that although the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations might be binding as a matter of international law, it does not have domestic binding effect because it is not self-executing and no legislation on the books had put its obligations into effect. The decision raises serious questions about the binding nature of the United States’ many treaty commitments.
In the forthcoming Munaf v. Geren and Geren v. Omar opinions, the Court will have to decide whether federal courts can exercise jurisdiction over habeas petitions brought by U.S. citizens detained by multinational forces in Iraq. Relatedly, in Boumediene v. Bush, the Court will decide whether the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which stripped detainees of the right to challenge in federal courts their indefinite designation as enemy combatants, violates the constitutional rights of those detainees to federal habeas relief. This group of habeas cases raises important issues with respect to the relationship between the Constitution and U.S. participation in international organizations, but also with respect to the relationship between international law and extraterritorial application of the Constitution.
While it is true that a number of these questions and concerns have arisen in the context of the war on terror, it remains to be seen how these issues will relate to other pressing national interests that converge on the international plane. Are the same principles applicable to concerns that also arise in times of peace, such as human rights violations and environmental degradation? Does the Constitution allow for the U.S. government to delegate authority to international institutions and officials who are not chosen by the U.S. citizenry? What is the proper role for customary, as opposed to treaty-based, international law in U.S. courts?
By focusing on these questions and more, this panel will highlight the expanding and increasingly complex interaction between the U.S. Constitution and international law.
Panel III: Approaches to Human Rights: International Law and Constitutionalism
The intersection between constitutionalism and human rights regimes, both domestic and supranational, has been a fertile ground for scholarship in recent years. In particular, the emergence of regional human rights regimes has substantially altered the legal landscape in this area. The European Court of Human Rights (“ECtHR”) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (“IACtHR”) are illustrative examples of such regimes.
The ECtHR has in many ways become a victim of its own success. The Court faces a daunting docket crisis stemming from the expanding number of states subject to its jurisdiction, its favorable reputation, its expansive interpretations of individual liberties, a distrust of domestic judiciaries in some countries, and entrenched human rights problems in others. In response to the burgeoning backlog of cases, numerous proposals for restructuring have been tabled by the European Council. These proposals – ranging from enhancing the judicial filtering mechanism to improving domestic remedies for redressing violations – raise fundamental questions about the Court’s future identity. How these proposals should be understood, and whether they or not they should be implemented, are questions meriting urgent and careful consideration.
The IACtHR serves as an interesting counterpoint to the ECtHR in several key ways. Having elaborated a significant body of human rights jurisprudence through interpretation of regional human rights conventions and the adaptation of European and global precedents, the Court has aspired to influence beyond its region by offering innovative interpretations of human rights and by identifying norms as jus cogens. The effects of such expansive interpretation, both with respect to the inter-American community and the wider international community, remain to be seen.
The intersection of international human rights law and constitutionalism has not been limited to the realm of supranational human rights courts.
The European Court of Justice (“ECJ”) will soon decide whether or not European Union enforcement of a U.N. Security Council decision imposing economic sanctions on individuals with suspected terrorist affiliations contravenes certain fundamental rights. The most pressing human rights concerns relate to the difficulty for the afflicted individual to challenge the sanctions imposed against him. This preclusion quite explicitly implicates the right to a fair trial and an effective remedy. A collision between U.N. and E.U. legal systems could jeopardize the implementation of United Nations sanctions by several powerful European countries. In effect, if such sanctions were to be invalidated, E.U. member states would have to implement new laws giving effect to U.N. measures on their own territory, without running afoul of the ECJ’s ruling.
By exploring an illustrative cross-section of issues involving fundamental rights, this panel seeks to sketch the contours of how international law and domestic constitutions interact to shape human rights law.
Speaker Bios
Panel I: Comparative Constitutional Perspectives
Irwin Cotler is a Canadian Member of Parliament, first elected in a by-election in November 1999 with 92% of the vote, in what was characterized as “the most stunning electoral victory in this century by any standard”. He was re-elected in the general elections of November 2000, June 2004, and January 2006, with the highest Liberal majority in the country. On December 12, 2003, the Prime Minister appointed him Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada where he helped transform the face of the judiciary through the appointment of two outstanding women justices to the Supreme Court of Canada, making the Supreme Court of Canada the most gender representative Supreme Court in the world. As Minister, he also made the pursuit of international justice a priority, including, in particular, the combating of mass atrocity and genocide, and initiated the first-ever prosecution in Canada for incitement to genocide. Mr. Cotler is currently on leave as a Professor of Law at McGill University, where he is Director of its Human Rights Program, and Chair of InterAmicus, the McGill-based International Human Rights Advocacy Centre. He has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Yale Law School, and is the recipient of nine honorary doctorates, whose citations refer to him as “a scholar and advocate of international stature”.
Taghrid Hikmet is a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a position she has held since 2003. Judge Hikmet was the first female judge in Jordan, serving initially as Assistant of the Prosecutor General (1996-1998), then as a Judge on the Court of Appeal (1998-2002), and now as a Judge on the High Criminal Court. Prior to serving as a judge, she was a lawyer before Jordanian civil and criminal courts (1982-1996), the head of an educational institute in Amman (1978-1982), and a teacher in Jordanian schools (1965-1978). Judge Hikmet is a consultant for the Jordanian Center for Human Rights Studies, the chairwoman of the Higher Committee for the Election of the Jordanian National Committees for Women, and the President of the Family Protection Project in Jordan – an initiative aimed at reducing domestic violence, sexual abuse, and child abuse. In recognition of her work on the Family Protection Project, Judge Hikmet was awarded a United Nations Human Rights prize in 2003. She was also a 2007 recipient of the American Society of International Law’s “Prominent Women in International Law Award.” Judge Hikmet is a graduate of Damascus University, having received both a B.A. in Law and an M.A. in General International Law. Her research interests include women’s rights, human rights, and family law.
Noah Feldman is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, specializing in constitutional studies, with particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. He is also a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Feldman was Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005. In 2004, he was a visiting professor at Yale Law School and a fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center. In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. From 1999 to 2002, he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Before that, he served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 to 1999) and to Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1997 to 1998). He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D.Phil. in Islamic Thought from Oxford University in 1994. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He is the author of four books: Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton Univ. Press 2008); Divided By God: America’s Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton Univ. Press 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003).
Frank I. Michelman is Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University, where he has taught since 1963. He is the author of Brennan and Democracy (1999), and has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, property law and theory, local government law, and jurisprudence. Professor Michelman is a past President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005, he was awarded the American Philosophical Society’s Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the United States Association of Constitutional Law and of the National Advisory Board of the American Constitution Society. Over the past several years, he has maintained an active interest in matters of constitutionalism in South Africa.
Panel II: The U.S. Constitution & International Law
Sarah Cleveland is Louis Henkin Professor of Human and Constitutional Rights at Columbia Law School. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia Law School, Professor Cleveland was Marrs McLean Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law, where she also served as Faculty Director of the Transnational Worker Rights Clinic and was the recipient of the 2000 Excellence in Teaching Award. Professor Cleveland has also previously taught at Oxford University, Harvard Law School, and the University of Michigan Law School, and was a law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the Supreme Court of the United States (1993-1994), and to Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (1992-1993). Professor Cleveland’s areas of expertise include international human rights, foreign affairs and the Constitution, international trade and labor rights, and international law in U.S. courts. She has authored or co-authored numerous amicus briefs, particularly regarding the legal rights of foreign nationals, and served as an expert on the Afghanistan Transitional Commercial Law Project Working Group, drafting a labor code for post-Taliban Afghanistan, and on the Erlenborn Commission, reviewing the provision of legal services to aliens in the United States. She serves on the legal advisory committees of several human rights organizations, including the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco, and the International Labor Rights Fund and the Farmworker Justice Fund in Washington, D.C.
David M. Golove is Hiller Family Foundation Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. He has secured a reputation as one of the most original and promising scholars in constitutional law. In a recent book-length article for the Michigan Law Review, “Treaty-Making and the Nation: The Historical Foundations of the Nationalist Conception of the Treaty Power,” Professor Golove comprehensively considers a question of constitutional law that has been controversial from the moment of the nation’s birth in 1776 and remains so today: Can the United States government, through its power to make treaties, effectively regulate subjects that would otherwise be beyond the reach of Congress’s enumerated legislative powers? For example, a treaty prohibiting the death penalty? He answers yes, and in doing so has produced both a major work of legal historical scholarship and an important legal and constitutional defense of federal power. In 1995, an article by Professor Golove in the Harvard Law Review dealt with another fundamental issue in foreign relations law: the undeniable fact that many international accords today are approved not through the treaty processes mandated in the U.S. Constitution, but by majority votes of both houses. In a more recent article published in the NYU Law Review, he challenges the distinguished constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, in a debate over the interpretation of the Treaty Clause, which Professor Golove defended in his Harvard Law Review article. In 1999, Professor Golove published a piece in the University of Colorado Law Review supporting the President’s authority to order military operations to implement a United Nations Security Council Resolution without authorization by Congress. He received his B.A. from Berkeley in 1979 and has law degrees from Boalt Hall and Yale. He teaches Constitutional Law and International Law. Professor Golove is a member of the faculty Executive Committee of the NYU Institute for International Law and Justice and Director of the J.D.-LL.M. program in international law.
Edwin S. Kneedler is a Deputy Solicitor General in the United States Department of Justice. He is responsible for reviewing Supreme Court briefs and appeal and amicus recommendations in court of appeals cases on behalf of the United States Government in a variety of subject areas, including cases involving the Departments of State, Interior, Agriculture, Labor, and Health and Human Services, as well as many constitutional and administrative law cases involving federal agencies generally. Ed has participated in the briefing or oral argument of a number of cases in the Supreme Court on behalf of the United States concerning separation of powers, including INS v. Chadha, Bowsher v. Synar, and Morrison v. Olson, as well as cases involving foreign relations, including Dames & Moore v. Regan, Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council, Garamendi v. American Insurance Ass’n, and Sosa v. Alvarez, and numerous cases under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Ed has also been extensively involved over the years in cases in the Supreme Court and lower courts in cases involving the Alien Tort Statute, immunities of foreign officials, and the Act of State Doctrine. Ed is a 1974 graduate of the University of Virginia Law School. He served as a law clerk to Judge Browning of the Ninth Circuit from 1974 to 1975. He joined the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice in October 1975. He then joined the Office of the Solicitor General in June 1979. He was appointed a Deputy Solicitor General in 1993.
John O. McGinnis is Stanford Clinton Sr. Professor of Law at the Northwestern University School of Law. Professor McGinnis clerked for the Hon. Kenneth W. Starr, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. From 1987 to 1991, Professor McGinnis was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. He is a scholar in both the area of constitutional and international law. Professor McGinnis has been appointed chairman of the government’s advisory committee on free trade agreements and labor standards. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representatives also has added him to the roster of Americans who can be appointed as panelists to resolve World Trade Organization disputes. He is a past winner of the Paul Bator award given by the Federalist Society to an outstanding academic under 40. He contributes regularly to both law reviews and popular journals.
Mark Tushnet is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He received his undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1967. He received a J.D. and M.A. in history from Yale University in 1971. He clerked for Judge George Edwards and Justice Thurgood Marshall before beginning to teach at the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1973. In 1981 he moved to the Georgetown University Law Center, and in 2006 to Harvard Law School. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas, University of Southern California, University of Chicago, Columbia University, New York University, and Harvard law schools. Professor Tushnet is the co-author of four casebooks, including the most widely used casebook on constitutional law, Constitutional Law (with Stone, Seidman, and Sunstein). He has written more than a dozen books, including a two-volume work on the life of Justice Thurgood Marshall, A Court Divided: The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law, and Weak Courts, Strong Rights: Judicial Review and Social Welfare Rights in Comparative Constitutional Law, and edited eight others. He has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Humanities Program, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and has written numerous articles on constitutional law and legal history. He was President of the Association of American Law Schools in 2003. In 2002 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ernest Young is Professor of Law at the Duke University School of Law. Professor Young studies constitutional law, foreign affairs and the Constitution, and federal courts. He is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the constitutional law of federalism, having written extensively on the Rehnquist Court’s “Federalist Revival” and the difficulties confronting courts as they seek to draw lines between national and state authority. He also is an active commentator on foreign affairs law, where he focuses on the interaction between domestic and supranational courts and the application of international law by domestic courts. Professor Young also writes on constitutional interpretation and constitutional theory. He has been known to dabble in maritime law and comparative constitutional law. A native of Abilene, Texas, Professor Young joined the Duke Law faculty in 2008, after serving as the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, where he had taught since 1999. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1990 and Harvard Law School in 1993. After law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (1993-94) and to Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1995-96). Professor Young practiced law at Cohan, Simpson, Cowlishaw, & Wulff in Dallas, Texas (1994-95) and at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. (1996-98), where he specialized in appellate litigation. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (2004-05) and Villanova University School of Law (1998-99), as well as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center (1997). Elected to the American Law Institute in 2006, Professor Young is an active participant in both public and private litigation in his areas of interest. He was the principal author of a brief on behalf of leading constitutional scholars in the Supreme Court’s decision on federal regulation of medical marijuana, Gonzales v. Raich, and he filed an amicus brief on behalf of Alabama and four other states in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Medellin v. Dretke, a case concerning presidential power and the authority of the International Court of Justice over domestic courts.
Panel III: Approaches to Human Rights: International Law and Constitutionalism
Laurence R. Helfer is Professor of Law and the Director of the International Legal Studies Program at Vanderbilt University Law School. He has authored numerous publications and lectured widely on his diverse research interests, which include interdisciplinary analysis of international law and institutions, human rights, international intellectual property, and international litigation and dispute settlement. His articles have appeared in leading American law reviews, including the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the California Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Vanderbilt Law Review, as well as in numerous specialized international law journals. Professor Helfer is a member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed Journal of World Intellectual Property and serves as an expert advisor to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. He recently received an International Research Incubator grant from the Center for the Americas at Vanderbilt to support an interdisciplinary research project on “The Politics of Intellectual Property Litigation in the Andean Community.” Professor Helfer also provides advice and assistance to non-governmental organizations that engage in human rights advocacy. He is a Visiting Professor of Law and the John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization at Harvard Law School during Spring 2008.
Ran Hirschl is Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Toronto, and holds a senior Canada Research Chair in Constitutionalism, Democracy & Development. He completed his B.A., LL.B., and M.A. at Tel-Aviv University, and received his M.Phil and Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999. His primary areas of interest are comparative constitutional law and politics, and comparative legal institutions. He is currently serving as the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, and at Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs, and has recently been appointed a Global Faculty member at NYU’s Hauser Global Law School. He has published extensively on comparative constitutional law and politics in journals such as Comparative Politics, Political Theory, Annual Review of Political Science, Law & Social Inquiry, American Journal of Comparative Law, Human Rights Quarterly, International Journal of Constitutional Law, and the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, as well as numerous articles in law reviews and chapters in edited collections, most recently in The Migration of Constitutional Ideas (Cambridge, 2006), and the Oxford Handbook of Law & Politics (Oxford, 2007). He is the editor (with Christopher L. Eisgruber), of a special symposium issue of I-CON International Journal of Constitutional Law entitled “North American Constitutionalism,” and the author of Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism (Harvard Univ. Press, 2004). He is currently completing two new books (both of which will also be published by Harvard Univ. Press) entitled: Sacred Judgments: The Dilemma of Constitutional Theocracy, and Lex Comparativus Novo: Comparative Legal Studies for the 21st Century.
Gerald L. Neuman is J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School. Prior to joining Harvard Law School, Neuman was the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence at Columbia Law School, as well as a member of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Law School (1984-1992). Neuman’s current research areas include habeas corpus and the rule of law, the rights of foreign nationals, transnational dimensions of constitutionalism, and the inter-American human rights regime. Neuman is a co-author of the casebook Human Rights (Foundation Press), and the author of Strangers to the Constitution: Immigrants, Borders, and Fundamental Law (Princeton Univ. Press).
Mattias Kumm is Professor of Law and Director of the LL.M / J.S.D. program in International and Comparative Law at the New York University School of Law. He has studied Law, Philosophy, and Political Sciences in Kiel, Paris, and Cambridge, MA, and has taught at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the European University Institute in Florence, and was an ‘Ethics Fellow’ at the Kennedy School of Government and a Jean Monnet Fellow at Harvard Law School before joining the NYU School of Law in Fall 2000. He has taught as a Visiting Professor at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany, as well as the University of Navarra, Spain and the National University of Singapore. Professor Kumm’s research focuses on issues of European and comparative constitutional law, international law and philosophy of law. Professor Kumm is a member of the faculty Executive Committee of the Institute for International Law and Justice.
Anne Peters is Professor of Public International and Constitutional Law at the University of Basel, a position she has held since 2001. In the academic year 2004-05, she was Dean of the Faculty of Law. Prior to taking up her tenured post, Professor Peters was Assistant Professor at the Walther-Schücking Institute of Public International Law at the Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, where she obtained the Habilitation qualification on the basis of her Habilitation thesis “Elemente einer Theorie der Verfassung Europas” (Elements of a Theory of the Constitution of Europe). Born in Berlin in 1964, Anne Peters studied Law, Modern Greek and Spanish at the Universities of Würzburg, Lausanne, and Freiburg im Breisgau and pursued post-graduate studies at Harvard Law School. She was a fellow of the National Scholarship Fondation of the German People (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes) and was awarded the prize from the Scientific Society at Freiburg im Breisgau for her doctoral dissertation on territorial referenda in international law in 1995. Her research activities cover the field of general public international law, especially its constitutionalization, European constitutional law, constitutional theory and constitutional comparison and national and international human rights. Anne Peters was in 2004 elected into the executive board of the European Society of International Law and in 2007 into the Swiss National Research Council of the National Science Foundation.