Scott Horton, ’81, a professor at Columbia Law School and a contributing editor at Harper’s, will deliver the 2012 M. Harvey Weil Centennial Lecture on Tuesday, February 21, 2012, in the Eidman Auditorium. Reception will begin at 6:00 p.m., and Horton’s talk, “More Security, Less Democracy? Struggling to Maintain Democratic Voices in the National Security Debate” will follow at 6:30 p.m. His talk will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Philip Bobbitt, Robert Chesney, and Jeffrey Tulis, and moderated by Sanford Levinson.
Horton is a contributing editor at Harper’s, where he covers legal and national security issues; an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School; and counsel at the law firm of DLA Piper, where he is heavily involved in emerging markets. As a practicing attorney, Scott’s work has focused on investment in emerging markets in Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East and West Africa. He has represented equity investors, international financial institutions and sovereigns and his work has focused heavily in natural resource exploration and development and related infrastructure. A life-long human rights advocate, Scott served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner and a number of other human rights and democracy advocates in the former Soviet Union. He is a director of the Moscow-based Andrei Sakharov Foundation. Horton has also been a leading figure at the bar, chairing three committees and directing major research projects dealing with U.S. government interrogation practices in the war on terror and the practice of extraordinary renditions for the New York City Bar Association. He has regularly appeared before Congress, most recently testifying before the House Judiciary, House Oversight and Senate Armed Services Committees on questions relating to the accountability of military contractors and the Justice Department’s uneven management of public integrity matters; he has also testified before the Council of Europe and the German Bundestag. On behalf of Human Rights First he supervised the production of a study of accountability for private security contractors in the War on Terror entitled Private Security Contractors at War: Ending a Culture of Impunity.
Horton has taught at Columbia Law School since 1994. His courses have included International Business Transactions Focused on Emerging Markets, Law of the Former Soviet Union and its Successor States, The Law of Armed Conflict, and a seminar on dealing with kleptocratic governments. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the board of NYU’s Center on Law and Security, the National Institute of Military Justice, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association.
Horton’s writing for Harper’s received the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting in 2011. His writing for Foreign Policy on the deterioration of U.S.-Pakistani relations was also selected as best long-form journalism in war reporting for 2011. He has worked closely with CBS, ABC, the Associated Press, MSNBC, NPR, Russian Television and the BBC on legal affairs reporting.