We at IntLawGrrls are honored to welcome Ruth Wedgwood (left) as today's guest blogger.Ruth is the Edward B. Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy and the Director of the International Law and Organizations Program at SAIS, the Washington, D.C.-based Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University.
In addition to teaching at SAIS, Ruth has been a Professor at Yale Law School, a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne), Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy, and Charles H. Stockton Professor at the U.S. Naval War College.
From 2002 to 2010 she was a member of the U.N. Human Rights Committee, which monitors state compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; she's also been an independent expert for International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Ruth has served on the Advisory Committee on International Law of the U.S. Department of State, on the Defense Policy Board, and on the CIA Historical Review Panel. She was a U.S. public delegate to Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and to the Wehrkunde Munich Security Conference. Among many other professional achievements, she is a founding member of Davos World Economic Forum Council on International Law, and has served as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, as a Vice President of the American Society of International Law, on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law, as Director of Studies at the Hague Academy for International Law. Currently she is President of the American Branch of the International Law Association; her guest post below seeks participation in and proposals for sessions at ABILA's next annual meeting.
After earning her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal, Ruth served as law clerk to Judge Henry Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and to Justice Harry Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. She was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York before entering academia.
Ruth chooses to honor her great-grandmother, Belle Hamer, who, Ruth writes,
taught school in a one-room school house on the Olympic Peninsula in late 1800s, before Washington was a state ... hardly world historical, but my kind of gal ...
(credit for photo of a circa 1904 one-room schoolhouse in Port Angeles, largest city on the peninsula) Today Hamer joins IntLawGrrls' other foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!
