Breakfast and Registration
In connection with the publication by GW Law Professors Sean Murphy and Edward Swaine of The Law of U.S. Foreign Relations (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), the George Washington Law Review Symposium convenes an eminent group of scholars to address key aspects of rules governing the conduct of U.S. relations with foreign countries and governing how international law applies within the U.S. legal system. The Law of U.S. Foreign Relations examines the constitutional and historical foundations of congressional, executive branch, and judicial authority in foreign affairs, which touches vital areas such as human rights and war powers; for example, the process of U.S. adherence to treaties and other international agreements is closely scrutinized, as well as how such law, as well as customary international law and the law-making acts of international organizations, can become a source of U.S. law. With an eye to this new publication and to cutting-edge issues in this dynamic field, the symposium contributors will explore select issues of U.S. foreign relations law, focusing in particular on structural aspects of U.S. governance in this area and the role of courts in resolving foreign relations cases. Please review GW's current COVID-19 guidelines before attending. Please see the full schedule below.
Symposium Schedule
Friday, October 7
Kelly Lounge
Jacob Burns Moot Court Room
Dean and Harold H. Greene Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School
Dayna Bowen Matthew, JD, PhD, is the Dean and Harold H. Greene Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. A leader in public health and civil rights law who focuses on disparities in health, health care, and the social determinants of health, Dean Matthew joined GW Law in 2020. She is the author of the bestselling book Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care and the newly released Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America.
The 21st Century National Security Constitution
Jacob Burns Moot Court Room
Sterling Professor of International Law, Yale Law School
Harold Hongju Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law and former Dean (2004−09) at Yale Law School, where he has taught since 1985. A graduate of Harvard, Magdalen College, Oxford (Marshall Scholar 1977), and Harvard Law School, he has received 17 honorary degrees and more than thirty awards for his work in human rights and international law. Professor Koh has served under four US presidents, as Senior Advisor (2021) and Legal Adviser to the US Secretary of State (2009−2013), Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (1998−2001), and Attorney-Adviser at the US Department of Justice (1983−1985). He also served in the judicial branch, as a law clerk for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the US Supreme Court, and Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
He is the author of eight books and more than 200 articles, has argued regularly before US and international courts, and testified frequently before the United States Congress. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, he is a member of the Council of the American Law Institute and received the Wolfgang Friedmann Award from Columbia Law School and the Louis B. Sohn Award from the American Bar Association for his lifetime achievements in international law.
Kelly Lounge
Structural Aspects of U.S. Foreign Relations Law
Jacob Burns Moot Court Room
University of Virginia School of Law
Ashley Deeks is the Class of 1948 Scholarly Research Professor at the University of Virginia Law School. Her primary research and teaching interests are in the areas of international law, national security, intelligence, and the application of new technologies to those fields. She has written articles on the use of force, executive power, secret treaties, the intersection of intelligence and international law, and the laws of armed conflict, and she is the co-author of a leading casebook on foreign relations law. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law, and a contributing editor to the Lawfare blog. She recently returned from serving as Special Assistant to the President, Associate White House Counsel, and Deputy Legal Advisor to the National Security Council.
Before joining UVA, she served as the assistant legal adviser for political-military affairs in the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser, where she worked on issues related to the law of armed conflict, the use of force, conventional weapons, intelligence, and the legal framework for the conflict with al-Qaida. In 2005, she served as the embassy legal adviser at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad during Iraq’s constitutional negotiations.
Deeks received her J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as an editor on the Law Review. After graduation, she clerked for Judge Edward R. Becker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Jean Galbraith is a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where she focuses on U.S. foreign relations law and public international law. Her work addresses the allocation of legal authority among U.S. governmental actors and, at the international level, between domestic actors and international regimes. Professor Galbraith has published in the Cornell Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the NYU Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and numerous international law journals. She has served as the editor of the Contemporary Practice of the United States (CPUS) section of the American Journal of International Law.
Professor Galbraith received her B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard University and her J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. After graduating law school, she served as a law clerk at the D.C. Circuit (for Judge Tatel) and at the Supreme Court of the United States (for Justice Stevens). She also spent a year as an Associate Legal Officer at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (for Judge Meron). In 2017 and in 2020, by vote of the graduating 3L classes, she received the Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence.
Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Professor Nzelibe is a scholar in the areas of international law, foreign relations, contracts, and international trade. He has authored and co-authored over 25 scholarly publications and was elected a member of the American Law Institute in 2020. Professor Nzelibe joined the Northwestern Pritzker Law faculty in 2004 after serving as a Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Nzelibeearned his JD from Yale Law School. He also holds an M.P.A. in international relations from Princeton University, where he was awarded a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Ford Foundation.
University of San Diego School of Law
Michael D. Ramsey is a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law, where he teaches and writes in the areas of Constitutional Law, Foreign Relations Law and International Law. He is the author of The Constitution’s Text in Foreign Affairs (Harvard University Press), co-editor of International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Continuity and Change (Cambridge University Press), and co-author of two casebooks, Transnational Law and Practice (2d ed., Aspen) and International Business Transactions: A Problem-Oriented Coursebook (13th ed., West). His scholarly articles have appeared in publications such as the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal and the American Journal of International Law. He received his B.A. magna cum laude from Dartmouth College and his J.D. summa cum laude from Stanford Law School. Prior to teaching, he served as a judicial clerk for Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court, and practiced law with the law firm of Latham & Watkins, where he specialized in international finance and investment. He has taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Department of Political Science and at the University of Paris – Sorbonne, in the Department of Comparative Law.
“International and National Security Law Challenges for the Biden Administration”
Jacob Burns Moot Court Room
Arnold & Porter
John Bellinger heads the firm's Global Law and Public Policy practice. He joined the firm in 2009, after holding several senior Presidential appointments in the US government, including as the Senate-confirmed Legal Adviser to the Department of State and Senior Associate Counsel to the President and Legal Adviser to the National Security Council (NSC) at the White House in the George W. Bush Administration.
Mr. Bellinger represents individuals, corporations, and sovereign governments in litigation in US courts and before international institutions. He has extensive experience in US foreign relations litigation involving the Alien Tort Statute, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, the Anti-Terrorism Act, and the diplomatic and official immunities of foreign governments and government officials. He advises clients on other public international law matters, including treaties and international agreements as well as international humanitarian law and human rights law. He also counsels US and foreign clients on national security legal and policy issues, including US and multilateral financial sanctions and asset controls, the extraterritorial application of US criminal and civil laws, and transactions reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
Judging U.S. Foreign Relations Law
Jacob Burns Moot Court Room
Georgetown University Law Center
After graduating from law school, where he was Articles and Book Reviews Editor of the Columbia Law Review, Professor Vazquez served as a law clerk to the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then practiced law with Covington and Burling in Washington, DC, before joining the law school faculty as a visiting professor of law in 1990, and then as an associate professor in 1991. From 2000 to 2003, he was the United States member of the Inter-American Juridical Committee, the organ of the Organization of American States responsible for juridical matters and for promoting the progressive development and codification of international law in the Americas. Professor Vazquez has written and taught primarily in the areas of international law, constitutional law, and federal courts.
University of Chicago Law School
Curtis Bradley is the Allen M. Singer Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Bradley is a graduate of Harvard Law School, after which he clerked for Justice Byron White on the U.S. Supreme Court and practiced law for several years at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. He is the author of numerous articles about U.S. foreign relations law, international law, constitutional law, and federal jurisdiction, as well as several books on these topics. His books include International Law in the U.S. Legal System (3d ed. 2020), and The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Foreign Relations Law (edited volume, 2019). He is also the co-author of two casebooks, Foreign Relations Law: Cases and Materials (7th ed. 2020), and Federal Courts and the Law of Federal-State Relations (10th ed. 2022). He has served as a Reporter for the Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States, as an Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of International Law, and as Counselor on International Law in the Legal Adviser’s Office of the U.S. State Department. He is currently finishing a book entitled Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs: How Governmental Practices Shape Constitutional Authority.
Cornell Law School
Maggie Gardner is a scholar of civil procedure and international law. She studies how U.S. courts handle cases involving foreign parties or foreign law. She is a founding editor of the Transnational Litigation Blog, and her scholarship on international litigation in U.S. courts has been published in such journals as the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, NYU Law Review, and Stanford Law Review. She is also interested in judicial decisionmaking and procedure from the perspective of U.S. district court judges. Her article on district court decisions citing other district court decisions (Dangerous Citations) was recently published in the NYU Law Review, and her article on U.S. district courts deciding cases collectively (District Court En Bancs) was recently published in the Fordham Law Review.
Prior to joining the Cornell faculty, Professor Gardner taught as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where she was an inaugural recipient of the HLS Student Government Teaching and Advising Award in 2016. Before entering academia, she practiced as a litigation and appellate associate with WilmerHale LLP in Washington, D.C. and clerked for Judge Sandra L. Lynch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Judge Michael H. Simon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. She also completed a year-long fellowship with the Appeals Chamber of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon under the direction of President Antonio Cassese.
Professor Gardner graduated cum laude from Harvard College, where she was a Truman Scholar, and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as a Supervising Editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Vanderbilt Law School
Ingrid Wuerth is a leading scholar of foreign affairs, public international law and transnational litigation. She joined Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 2007, was appointed director of the International Legal Studies Program in 2009, and was appointed director of the Branstetter Litigation and Dispute Resolution Program in 2018. She was named to the newly endowed Helen Strong Curry Chair in International Law in 2015. She currently serves as co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law and has previously served on the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Public International Law. She is a member of the American Law Institute and was named as a Reporter for the Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. Professor Wuerth has received numerous honors and fellowships, including the Morehead Scholarship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Fulbright Senior Scholar award, the German Chancellor's Fellowship, election to the German Society of International Law, election to the Order of the Coif and many teaching awards. She was the law school's associate dean for research from 2020 to 2022.
Before entering the legal academy, Wuerth was a law clerk for Judge Jan E. DuBois in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and Judge Jane Roth on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The class of 2018 elected her to give its commencement address. She is a contributing editor at Lawfare and a founding editor of the Transnational Litigation Blog (TLB).
Kelly Lounge
Jacob Burns Moot Court Room
The George Washington University Law School
The George Washington University Law School
The George Washington University Law School
Howard University School of Law
University of Virginia School of Law
Georgetown University Law Center
United States Agency for International Development
Jacob Burns Moot Court Room