The Life and Legacy of George Lister – Conference Participants

Conference Participants

Elizabeth Borgwardt is an Assistant Professor of History at Washington University and will be a visiting scholar at the Warren Center at Harvard University in Fall 2006. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1990 and a Ph.D. in History from Stanford in 2002. She is the author of A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2006), which won the 2006 Merle Curti Award, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians, and was the co-winner of the 2006 Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The book was also nominated for the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in History. She specializes in the history of U.S. foreign relations, the history of international law, and historical perspectives on human rights and globalization.
Joseph Eldridge is the University Chaplain at American University and also serves on the Board of Directors of the Latin America Working Group. He received his Master's in Theology from Southern Methodist University, an M.A. in International Studies from American University's School of International Service, and a Doctorate of Ministry from Wesley Theological Seminary. Beginning in 1974, he served as the director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and held that position for twelve years. In 1991 he established the Washington office of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and served as its director until 1997, when he assumed the position of University Chaplain.
Karen Engle is the W.H. Francis, Jr. Professor in Law and Director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at The University of Texas School of Law. She received her B.A. in philosophy from Baylor University in 1984 and her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1989. Following law school, she clerked for Judge Jerre S. Williams on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and then served as a post-doctoral Ford Fellow in Public International Law at Harvard Law School. Professor Engle writes and lectures extensively on international law and human rights. Her recent works include “Calling in the Troops: The Uneasy Relationship Between Human Rights and Humanitarian Intervention” (forthcoming in the Harvard Human Rights Law Journal), “Feminism and Its (Dis)contents: Criminalizing War-Time Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” (American Journal of International Law), “Liberal Internationalism, Feminism and the Suppression of Critique: Contemporary Approaches to Global Order in the United States,” Harvard International Law Journal (2005) and “International Human Rights and Feminisms: When Discourses Keep Meeting” in International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches (2005).
Arvonne Fraser is Senior Fellow Emerita of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, where she co-founded and served as the co-director of the Center on Women and Public Policy. She earned her B.A. in liberal arts from the University of Minnesota in 1948. She served as the Secretary (1948–1951) and Vice Chairman (1956–1962) of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and from 1963 to 1976 worked in the office of Congressman Donald Fraser. In 1975 she was the coordinator and first director of the Office of Women in Development at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). She was a member of the U.S. delegation to Mexico City and Copenhagen for the United Nations' 1975 and 1980 World Conferences on Women, and in 1985 started the International Women's Rights Action Watch (IWRAW) and served as its director. In 1993 and 1994 she served as the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. She recently co-edited, with Irene Tinker, Developing Power: How Women Transformed International Development (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2004) and is the author of numerous pieces about the development of women's human rights, the value of women's work, and issues such as health care, education, and family.
Donald Fraser, former member of Congress and former mayor of Minneapolis, is presently Chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Education Foundation, President of the Southeast Minneapolis Council on Learning, and on the board of several non-profit organizations, including Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. He received his J.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1948. From 1954 to 1962, he served as a member of the Minnesota state senate. In 1963 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Minnesota's 5th District and served until 1979 as a member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. During his tenure as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Chair of the Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements, he initiated the first comprehensive study of U.S. foreign policy and international human rights. The legislation he authored played a vital role in the development of U.S. human rights foreign policy and resulted in the creation of an Office for Human Rights within the State Department. In 1979, he was elected mayor of Minneapolis and held that office for fourteen years. He has taught and lectured on international human rights for organizations including the Human Rights Program at the University of Minnesota, the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies, and Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights.
Claudio Grossman is Professor of Law and Dean of the Washington College of Law at American University and the Raymond I. Geraldson Scholar in International and Humanitarian Law. He also serves as Vice Chairman of the United Nations Committee against Torture, as Chair of the Committee on International Cooperation of the Association of American Law Schools, is a member of the Commission for the Control of Interpol's Files, and is on the Board of Directors of the Inter-American Institute for Human Rights. He earned his first law degree from the University of Chile in 1971 and his Doctor of the Science of Law from the University of Amsterdam in 1980. He served as director of the International Legal Studies Program at American University (1983–1993), as the acting dean of the law school (1993–1994), and as dean of Graduate Studies (1994-1995) before being appointed dean of the law school in 1995. He was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) from 1994–2001, and during that time was elected to several offices within the organization, including the position of President (1996, 2001). In addition, he was the IACHR's special rapporteur on women's rights, special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous populations, and served as the observer for the Organization of American States (OAS) in the case of the AMIA trial. He has participated in numerous on-site visits and election-observing missions in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. The Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) named him as the recipient of the 2002 Chapultepec Grand Prize for protecting and preserving freedom of expression and of the press. He is the author of numerous books and articles on international law, human rights, and the law of international organizations.
Morton Halperin is the Director of U.S. Advocacy for the Open Society Institute (OSI), overseeing all policy advocacy on U.S. and international issues, including promotion of human rights and support for open societies abroad. He earned his B.A. from Columbia College and a Ph.D. in International Relations from Yale University in 1961. He taught at Harvard University from 1960 to 1966. He has served in numerous administrations, including the Johnson administration, where he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) and the Nixon administration, where he was Senior Staff member of the National Security Council staff. In the Clinton administration, he served as a consultant to the Secretary of Defense and the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy at the National Security Council, and as the Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State. He worked for many years for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), serving as Director of the Center for National Security Studies there from 1975 to 1992, and was also Director of the Washington Office during some of those years. He won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1985. The recipient of numerous awards, he is also the Director of the Security and Peace Initiative, serves as Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, is the Chairman of the Board of the Health Privacy Project at Georgetown University and of the Democracy Coalition Project, serves on the boards of DATA and The Constitution Project, and is the chair of the Advisory Board of the Center for National Security Studies. He has authored, co-authored, and edited more than a dozen books, including The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace (Routledge, 2004) and Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Brookings Institution 2006), and is the author of numerous articles.
Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is the junior Senator from Iowa. He is a member of several Senate committees, including the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and the Appropriations Committee. He is the ranking Democrat of the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee, as well as the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education subcommittee. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the RugMark Foundation. He received his B.A. in Government and Economics from Iowa State University and his J.D. from the Catholic University of America Law School in 1972. In 1969 he joined the staff of Iowa Congressman Neal Smith and accompanied a congressional delegation to South Vietnam. His photographs and detailed account of the “tiger cages” he witnessed there were published in Life Magazine in 1970 and brought to international attention the inhuman conditions of political prisoners at Con Son Island. In 1974, he won election to the U.S. Congress from Iowa’s Fifth Congressional District and served in the House of Representatives for the next 10 years. During his time in the House, he authored the Harkin Amendments to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which prohibited giving military and economic aid to countries with poor human rights records. In 1984 he won election to the U.S. Senate and returned there in 1990, 1996 and 2002, making him the first Iowa Democrat ever to earn a fourth Senate term. In 1990 he authored and was the chief sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act, landmark legislation protecting the civil rights of more than 57 million Americans with physical and mental disabilities. A longtime advocate in the fight to abolish child labor, he urged President Clinton in 1998 to issue an Executive Order banning the U.S. government from using items made by forced and indentured labor. In the same year he also served as the lead cosponsor and a testimony witness on behalf of the International Labor Organization’s Convention 18 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor treaty. In 2001 he helped secure funding for an International Labor Affairs Bureau contract with the University of Iowa to provide $900,000 for research on abusive and exploitative child labor. In addition, he and Representative Eliot Engel worked with chocolate and cocoa industry representatives to develop the Harkin-Engel protocol, which was signed in 2001, to eliminate the worst forms of child labor in the growing and processing of cocoa beans and their derivative products. More recently, and in continued support of the struggle to secure international human rights, he supported an amendment offered by Senator John McCain to the 2006 Defense Appropriations bill to prohibit the use of torture or cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees in Department of Defense custody. He is the co-author, with C.E. Thomas, of Five Minutes to Midnight: Why the Nuclear Threat is Growing Faster Than Ever (Carol Publishing Corporation, 1990).
Steven Inskeep is co-host of National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. In 1990 he graduated from Morehead State University, where he also worked as a radio sportscaster. He worked for public and commercial stations in and around New York City prior to joining NPR full-time to cover the 1996 presidential primary in New Hampshire. He went on to serve as host of Weekend All Things Considered and as a correspondent covering national security issues for NPR. In 1999, he was awarded a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism and traveled to Colombia to report on that country's civil war. Upon his return, he was named NPR's Pentagon correspondent and joined an award-winning team that covered the Kosovo bombing campaign. He has also covered the U.S. Senate and the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush, and, after the September 11 attacks, covered the war in Afghanistan, the hunt for al-Qaida suspects in Pakistan, and the war in Iraq. In 2003, he was honored by the Press Club of Atlantic City with a National Headliner Award for investigating a military raid that went wrong in Afghanistan. In 2004 he joined the Morning Edition team and in 2006 received a Robert F. Kennedy journalism award for “The Price of African Oil,” a series on conflict in Nigeria. His journalism has appeared in several publications, including The New York Times.
David Kennedy is the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Director of the European Law Research Center. He earned his J.D. from Harvard in 1980 and a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts in 1984. He joined the faculty of Harvard Law School in 1981 and served as the Chair of the Graduate Committee and the Faculty Director for International and Graduate Legal Studies from 1991 to 1997. As a practicing lawyer and consultant he has worked with the United Nations, the Commission of the European Union, and the private firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton in Brussels. He is the author of The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2004), Of War and Law (Princeton, 2006), and Economic Development Expertise (forthcoming, Princeton, 2007).
Peter Kornbluh is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, where he currently directs the Archive's Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects. He received his B.A. in Latin American Studies from Brandeis in 1979 and an M.A. in International Relations from George Washington University. He was co-director of the Iran-contra documentation project and director of the Archive's project on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. From 1990 to 1999, he taught at Columbia University as an adjunct assistant professor of international and public affairs. He is the author or co-editor of a number of Archive books: The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 and The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History, both published by the New Press in 1998 and 1993 respectively, and Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (New Press, 1998). On the 30th anniversary of the Chilean military coup in September 2003, he published The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, which the Los Angeles Times selected as a "best book" of the year. In November 2003, he served as producing consultant on the Discovery Times documentary, "Kennedy and Castro: The Secret History," which was based on his article in Cigar Aficionado, "Kennedy and Castro: The Secret Quest for Accommodation."
Alan J. Kuperman is Assistant Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.A. in international relations and international economics from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to his academic experience, Professor Kuperman has been a Fellow in the U.S. Agency for International Development's Office of Caribbean Affairs, Legislative Director for Congressman Charles Schumer of New York, Legislative Assistant for U.S. House Speaker Thomas Foley, Chief of Staff for Congressman James Scheuer, and Senior Policy Analyst for the nongovernmental Nuclear Control Institute. He has published articles and book chapters on ethnic conflict, U.S. military intervention and nuclear proliferation. He is also the author of The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda and co-editor of Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazard, Rebellion, and Civil War.
Diane La Voy is an international development practitioner, having recently coordinated the Civic Engagement for Education Reform in Central America (CERCA) Project, which was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). She is also active in promoting U.S. citizen engagement at national and local levels. A graduate of Wellesley College, she received the Master's in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. In 1974 she founded Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and served as its first director. While on the staff of a Senate investigatory committee in the mid-1970s, she co-authored reports on covert action in Chile and elsewhere; later, as a staff member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, she wrote staff reports critical of intelligence performance in Iran and Central America. She served as Inter-American Foundation Representative for Chile and Argentina, and during the Clinton administration led some of the reforms at USAID.
Grover Joseph Rees is Special Representative for Social Issues in the International Organizations Bureau of the State Department. He was Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste (East Timor) from 2002 to 2006, and was appointed to his current position in October 2006. He received his B.A. in History from Yale in 1972 and his J.D. from Louisiana State University Law School in 1978. After Law School, he clerked for then-Associate Justice Albert Tate, Jr., of the Louisiana Supreme Court. Beginning in 1979, he spent seven years as an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Texas. In 1986 he served as special counsel to then-Attorney General Edwin Meese, III, and from 1986 to 1991 served as Chief Justice (and later Associate Justice) of the High Court of American Samoa. He was General Counsel of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1991 to 1993. From 1995 to 2001, as Staff Director and Chief Counsel of the Subcommittee on International Organizations and Human Rights of the House International Relations Committee and as counsel to the full International Relations Committee, he contributed to the drafting and enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, Torture Victims Protection Act, and International Religious Freedom Act. From 2001 to 2002 he served as Counsel to the Committee, where his responsibilities included Southeast Asian affairs, refugees, and international human rights.
William D. Rogers is a retired Senior Partner of Arnold & Porter LLP and, since 2004, has been Vice Chairman of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm owned and managed by Henry Kissinger. He received his LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1951. From 1961 until 1965 he was Special Counsel and later Deputy U.S. Coordinator for the Alliance for Progress. In 1965, he became the first President of the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York. He served as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs from October 1974 until June 1976, and then as the Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs from June 1976 until January 1977. He was a special emissary to El Salvador for President Carter in 1980, co-chaired the Bilateral Commission on the Future of United States-Mexican Relations, and was a lecturer at Cambridge on public international law from 1982 to 1983. He has served as President of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) and remains a member of the Executive Council.
Karin Ryan is the Director of Human Rights Initiatives at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, where she works with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Mrs. Rosalynn Carter on a range of issues, including assisting their efforts on behalf of victims of human rights violations through personal interventions with heads of state. She earned her B.A. in political science from Emory University and her B.A. in contemporary writing and production from Berklee College of Music. Ms. Ryan has represented the Carter Center in many international negotiations, including the International Criminal Court, the human rights of women, the U.N. Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, and most recently on the establishment of a U.N. Human Rights Council, and has worked closely with the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to organize expert consultations designed to strengthen the role of the OHCHR within the United Nations system. She has participated in election observation missions to Haiti, the occupied Palestinian Territories, the DRC, and Nigeria. She has also coordinated an annual “Human Rights Defenders Policy Forum,” from 2003-2006, whose aim is to support those on the frontlines of the struggle for human rights and democracy all over the world.
John Salzberg is the Chair of the Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace, Co-Chair of the Human Rights Task Force of the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area, and a member of the steering committee of the Friends International Center in Ramallah. He received his Ph.D. in International Relations from New York University in 1973. As a staff member to former Congressman Donald Fraser, he developed legislation establishing the Human Rights Office and the annual State Department report on human rights. From 1973 to 1978 he held the position of Staff Consultant to the House Subcommittee on International Organizations. He served as Regional Affairs Officer for the Bureau of Human Rights, Department of State, from 1979 to 1981. In 1992 he began volunteering with the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT) and then became CVT's Washington representative. He played a key role in the passage of the Torture Victims Relief Act of 1998 and subsequent reauthorization acts in 1999 and 2003. In 2005 he received the Eclipse Award from CVT in recognition of his extraordinary service on behalf of torture survivors. He retired from CVT in December 2005.
Alvaro Santos is an Assistant Professor in the Emerging Scholars Program at the University of Texas and is an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School. He obtained his first law degree with high honors from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1999 and his LL.M. from Harvard (2000), where he held a Ford Foundation scholarship. He teaches International Trade Law, Law and Economic Development, and Transnational Labor Law. Professor Santos's scholarly work analyzes the legal and judicial reform agenda promoted by international development institutions. He is author of “The World Bank's Uses of the “Rule of Law” Promise in Economic Development,” in The New Law and Development: A Critical Appraisal (Cambridge 2006), which he co-edited with David Trubek.
Lars Schoultz is the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and past president of the Latin American Studies Association. He received his M.A. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973. He has held a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Buenos Aires to study Argentine electoral behavior, two postdoctoral research grants from the Social Science Research Council to study United States policy toward Latin America, and a Ford Foundation grant to study U.S. immigration policy. He has been a MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security and held residential fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the National Humanities Center. He is the author of Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Harvard University Press, 1998), as well as several other books.
Gerald Torres is Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and holds the Bryant Smith Chair in Law at the University of Texas. He received his AB from Stanford in 1974, his JD from Yale Law School in 1977 and his LLM from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1980. He is former president of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). A leading figure in critical race theory, Torres also is an expert in agricultural and environmental law. He served as deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and as counsel to then U.S. attorney general Janet Reno. Torres is co-author of The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2002) (with Lani Guinier). Among his recent articles are “The Evolution of Equality in American Law” ( Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2003), “Grutter v. Bollinger/Gratz v. Bollinger: View from a Limestone Ledge” (Columbia Law Review, 2003), and “Translation and Stories” (Harvard Law Review, 2002).
Tracy Wahl is a producer for the weekend editions of National Public Radio's All Things Considered. She earned her B.A. in Communications from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she completed her coursework toward a Ph.D. in Political Science. Since coming to NPR in 1997, she has worked on a variety of projects, including a profile (with Lisa Simeone) of President Jimmy Carter at his home in Plains, Georgia, and a piece (with Jennifer Ludden) on the problems of witness intimidation in criminal cases. She is a friend of the Lister family and has assisted in the arrangement of his papers and conducted interviews for the online exhibit on Lister's life.
Ruth Wedgwood is the Edward B. Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy and the director of the program on International Law and Organization at Johns Hopkins University. She serves as the U.S. member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and on the U.S. Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee for International Law, the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, and the CIA’s Historical Review Panel. She earned her A.B. from Harvard University, studied economics at the London School of Economics as a Harvard prize fellow, and received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1976. She clerked for Judge Henry Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Justice Henry Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. Before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, she served in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, as Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, and was Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Among her many affiliations, Professor Wedgwood has been a board member of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, director of studies at the Hague Academy for International Law in the Netherlands, and a member of the Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, which reported on the problems of catastrophic terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Her scholarly essays have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the American Journal of International Law, the European Journal of International Law, and the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, among others. She also comments on international law and foreign policy issues on National Public Radio, BBC, and other public media programs, and writes occasionally on foreign policy and international law for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Time Magazine, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and The National Interest magazine.