Donald Francis Donovan is a partner in the New York office of Debevoise & Plimpton. He has argued international law in a broad range of international and domestic fora, including the International Court of Justice and the US Supreme Court. He regularly appears as both counsel and arbitrator in proceedings initiated under the auspices of the world’s leading arbitral institutions and litigates international disputes in U.S. courts. For his achievements in both international arbitration and international human rights, he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Jurisprudencia by the Mexican Bar Association, the first non-Mexican so honored, and was inducted as a member of the Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca, the highest award given by the Government of Mexico to non-Mexicans.

Mr. Donovan currently serves on the Advisory Committee for the Restatement of the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration of the American Law Institute, as a Member of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration (ICCA), having recently completed two terms as its Vice-President, and as a member of the Board of Directors of Human Rights First and Chair of its Litigation Committee. He formerly served as Chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration. He teaches international commercial and treaty arbitration at New York University School of Law.

Mr. Donovan served as law clerk to Associate Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the US Supreme Court and legal assistant to Judge Howard M. Holtzmann of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal. He received his B.A. in 1977 from the University of Virginia and his J.D. in 1981 from Stanford Law School.

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Elizabeth (Betsy) Andersen is Executive Director and Executive Vice President of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), a position she has held since 2006.  Previously she served as the Executive Director of the American Bar Association's Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (ABA CEELI), and as Executive Director of Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia Division.  Earlier in her career, she served as Legal Assistant to Judge Georges Abi-Saab of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and as a law clerk to Judge Kimba M. Wood of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.

Ms. Andersen is a graduate of Yale Law School, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and Williams College, from which she received the College’s Bicentennial Medal in 2006.  Her area of expertise is international humanitarian, human rights, and refugee law.  She serves as co-editor of the ASIL Studies in Transnational Legal Theory Series; as a member of the governing boards of the Washington Foreign Law Society and Friends of the Law Library of Congress; and as a member of the advisory committees of the American University Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, the International Senior Lawyers Project, and the Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies.

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Curtis Bradley is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and a professor of public policy at ASIL Academic Partner Duke Law School. Bradley graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1988 and subsequently clerked for Justice Byron White on the U.S. Supreme Court. He entered academia in 1995, after practicing law for several years at ASIL Law Firm Sponsor Covington & Burling in Washington, DC. Bradley has been teaching international law and related subjects for more than 16 years. During that time, he has written dozens of law review articles concerning both international law and U.S. foreign relations law, including a number of articles published in the American Journal of International Law. He is also the co-author of a leading casebook on U.S. foreign relations law. Bradley has served on ASIL’s Executive Council and continues to serve on the Journal’s Board of Editors. He has also held the position of counselor on international law in the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser and is currently a member of the U.S. secretary of state’s Advisory Committee on International Law. At Duke, he co-directs the school’s Center for International and Comparative Law.

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John R. Crook is a professorial lecturer at ASIL Academic Partner George Washington University School of Law, where he teaches international arbitration. He is a frequent consultant to counsel in International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes and other international proceedings, has served as an arbitrator under NAFTA, and was a commissioner on the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission, which successfully addressed extensive claims stemming from the two countries’ 1998-2000 war. Crook served for nearly three decades in the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser. He was the second U.S. agent at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in The Hague, was deeply involved in creating the UN Compensation Commission in Geneva, and appeared in several cases before the International Court of Justice. From 2000 to 2004, he was general counsel of the Multinational Force and Observers. Crook edits the American Journal of International Law’s section on Contemporary U.S. Practice Relating to International Law and has written extensively on dispute settlement. He has served in a number of capacities in the leadership of the Society, on the editorial boards of the Journal and International Legal Materials, as counsellor on the Executive Council, and as chair of the Society’s Honors Committee and Ad Hoc Committee on Electronic Publication.

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Makau Mutua is Dean, SUNY Distinguished Professor, and the Floyd H. & Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York.  He teaches international human rights, international business transactions, and international law.  Dean Mutua has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, the University of Iowa College of Law, the University of Puerto Rico School of Law, the United Nations University for Peace in Costa Rica, and the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain.

He was educated at the University of Nairobi, the University of Dar-es-Salaam, and at Harvard Law School, where he obtained a Doctorate of Juridical Science in 1987.  Professor Mutua was Co-Chair of the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law (ASIL).   He is currently a Vice President of the ASIL, and was previously on its Executive Council.  He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2002-03, while on sabbatical in Kenya, Professor Mutua was appointed by the Government of Kenya as Chairman of the Task Force on the Establishment of a Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission.  The Task Force recommended a truth commission for Kenya.  During the same time, Professor Mutua was a delegate to the National Constitutional Conference, the forum that produced a contested draft constitution for Kenya.

Professor Mutua is the author of several books including Kenya’s Quest for Democracy: Taming Leviathan (2008), Human Rights NGOs in East Africa: Political and Normative Tensions (2008), and Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique (2002).  He has written numerous scholarly articles exploring topical subjects in international law, human rights, and religion.  These include “Human Rights in Africa: the Limited Promise of Liberalism,” "The Ideology of Human Rights," "Hope and Despair for a New South Africa: the Limits of Rights Discourse," "The Banjul Charter and the African Cultural Fingerprint: an Evaluation of the Language of Duties," and "Why Redraw the Map of Africa: a Moral and Legal Inquiry" published in various law reviews.  He has written human rights reports for the United Nations and leading NGOs.  He is a columnist for the Sunday Nation (Kenya). He has authored dozens of articles for popular publications such as the New York Times, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Chronicle of Higher Education, Daily Nation, East African Standard, and the Washington Post. 

Previously, Professor Mutua was the Associate Director at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program.  He was also the Director of the Africa Project at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.  He serves as the Chairman of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and sits on the boards of several international organizations and academic journals such as the Leiden Journal of International Law.  He is a frequent commentator on politics, human rights, law, and current affairs in the print and electronic media.

He has conducted numerous human rights, diplomatic, and rule of law missions to countries in Africa, Latin America, and Europe.  He has lectured and spoken at public fora in many parts of the world, including Japan, Brazil, France, and Ethiopia.

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Abby Cohen Smutny is a partner in the Washington, DC, office of ASIL Law Firm Sponsor White & Case LLP. She is widely recognized as a leading expert on international arbitration, with particular expertise in investorstate disputes and disputes involving issues of public international law. She has served as counsel both for states and for investors in dozens of cases in her more than 20 years of practice. Smutny is a member of the American Law Institute and serves on the Advisory Committee for the Restatement of the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration of the American Law Institute. She also served as a member of the Special Drafting Committee of the ICC Task Force on Arbitration with States and State Entities. She is vice-chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration, co-editor-in-chief of World Arbitration and Mediation Review, a member of the Editorial Committee of the Yearbook on International Investment Law and Policy, and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of International Arbitration. She is a former vice-chair of the Arbitration Committee of the International Bar Association and chair of its Sub-Committee on Investment Treaty Arbitration. She is also a former chair of the International Law Section of the District of Columbia Bar. Smutny has served several terms as a member of ASIL's Executive Council and also has served as a member of the Society's Executive Committee. Smutny completed her studies at Vassar College, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Université des Langues et Lettres de Grenoble, and the University of Chicago School of Law.

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Jose Alvarez is the Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law at New York University Law School. He is also serving as special adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on a pro bono basis. Professor Alvarez was formerly the Hamilton Fish Professor of International Law and Diplomacy and the executive director of the Center on Global Legal Problems at Columbia Law School, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, an associate professor at the George Washington University's National Law Center, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law Center.

Prior to entering academia in 1989, Professor 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.  Educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and Oxford University, Professor Alvarez has also been in private practice and was a judicial clerk to the late Hon. Thomas Gibbs Gee of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.  A former international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Professor Alvarez is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Law Institute, and has long been active in bar activities at both the local and national levels.  He has served on a number of advisory bodies at the national level, including the ABA Task Force relating to the establishment of the ad hoc tribunal to adjudicate war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and the UN Association's National Advisory Committee on UN Financing.  Prior to assuming the Presidency of the ASIL, Professor Alvarez was chair of the Society’s international organizations section, a member of its Executive Council, co-chair of the 1997 Annual Meeting, and Vice President.

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Lucy F. Reed, the immediate past President of ASIL, is a partner in the New York office of the international law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. She co-heads the firm’s preeminent global international arbitration group, specializing in investment treaty arbitrations and other public international law disputes. In addition to serving as counsel and arbitrator, Ms. Reed has served as a Commissioner of the Ethiopia-Eritrea Claims Commission (an international humanitarian law tribunal created by international agreement) and co-director of the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland (a Holocaust tribunal). She delivered private international law lectures at The Hague Academy of International Law in 2001 and has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 2003.

While with the US Department of State from 1985 to 1992, Ms. Reed served as the Legal Counselor at the US Embassy in The Hague, the US Agent to the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, and the Deputy Assistant Legal Adviser for International Claims and Investment Disputes. From 1995 to 1998, she was the first General Counsel of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), an international organization based in New York, in which capacity she led negotiations with North Korea.

Ms. Reed received her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1977, where she was on the Law Review, and her BA magna cum laude from Brown University in 1974, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1973.

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James Nafziger is the Thomas B. Stoel Professor of Law and Director of International Programs at the Willamette University College of Law.  He is also Honorary Professor at the East China University of Politics and Law.  After receiving B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Wisconsin and a J.D. from the Harvard Law School, Professor Nafziger was Henry Luce Fellow and later Administrative Director of the American Society of International Law.  He is a former Fulbright lecturer in Mexico and Mongolia as well as Scholar-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study Center in Bellagio, Italy.  In 2005 he was Co-director of Research at the Hague Academy of International Law.  Professor Nafziger received the Burlington Northern Foundation Award for “excellence in teaching and scholarly activity” and the university President’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship, in both cases the first given to a member of his law faculty.  Having initiated the Oregon Law Commission’s project to codify choice-of-law rules, he has served as its Reporter.  He is the author or editor of eight books, over 100 articles or essays in books, and 80 other published writings.

An elected member of the American Law Institute, he is an Honorary Vice-President of the American Branch of the International Law Association, having served as its President and Chair of its Executive Committee.  He also chairs the ILA’s Committee on Cultural Heritage Law and is Honorary President of the International Association of Sports Law.  He received an award for extraordinary contributions to the American Society of Comparative Law, having served as its Treasurer.  Professor Nafziger is on the National Council of the United Nations Association-USA and is a former president of both its Oregon Division and the Oregon International Council.

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Nancy Perkins, Counsel to firm, Arnold & Porter LLP, has a diverse  international  practice,  including arbitration and trade litigation,  regulatory   counseling,  and legislative work.  She has litigated disputes before the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes ("ICSID") and the GATT/World Trade Organization ("WTO"), including the first case ever brought under the WTO dispute settlement system.  She also has worked on antidumping and countervailing duty cases, proceedings under the Generalized System of Preferences, and matters involving Sections 201 and 301 of the U.S.  trade laws.  She has assisted several foreign governments in the negotiation of treaty provisions, and has counseled numerous clients with respect to export control and customs regulations, the Exon-Florio statute, FOCI matters, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the NAFTA, and antitrust, tax, and other aspects of foreign direct investment in the United States. Ms. Perkins is the Chair of the International Law Section of the D.C. Bar, Treasurer of the American Society of International Law ("ASIL"), and a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of International Legal Materials, published by the ASIL. She joined Arnold & Porter in 1988, following a clerkship with the Honorable Eugene H. Nickerson in the District Court for the Eastern District of New York.  She is a member of the Bars of both Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia, and is a member of the American Law Institute.

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