Professor Alvarez is the Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law at New York University Law School. Prior to coming to NYU, he was 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. At NYU he teaches courses on international law, foreign investment, and international organizations. He served as President of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) from 2006-2008 and is co-editor in chief, along with his NYU colleague, Benedict Kingsbury, of the American Journal of International Law.

Ira Belkin is the Executive Director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute. Prior to joining the Institute in September 2012, Belkin served as a program officer at the Ford Foundation in Beijing, where he worked on law and rights issues. His grant-making supported Chinese institutions working to build the Chinese legal system, to strengthen the rule of law and to enhance the protection of citizens’ rights, especially the rights of vulnerable groups. Prior to joining the foundation in 2007, Belkin combined a career as an American lawyer and federal prosecutor with a deep interest in China, and spent seven years working to promote the rule of law in China. His appointments included two tours at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and a year as a fellow at the Yale Law School China Law Center. After graduating from NYU Law, Belkin spent 16 years as a federal prosecutor including time in Providence, R.I., where he was chief of the criminal division, and in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he was deputy chief of the general crimes unit. Before attending law school, Belkin taught Chinese language at Middlebury College. He has lectured extensively in Chinese to Chinese audiences on the U.S. criminal justice system and to American audiences on the Chinese legal reform movement. In addition to his J.D. from New York University School of Law, Belkin has a master’s degree in Chinese studies from Seton Hall University and a bachelor’s degree from SUNY Albany.

Jerome Cohen is a leading American expert on Chinese law and government. He has been a professor at NYU School of Law since 1990 and is co-director of its US-Asia Law Institute at the NYU School of Law. A pioneer in the field, Mr Cohen began studying China’s legal system in the early 1960s, and from 1964 to 1979 introduced the teaching of Asian law into the curriculum of Harvard Law School, where he served as Jeremiah Smith Professor, associate dean and director of East Asian legal studies. In addition to his responsibilities at NYU, Mr Cohen served for several years as CV Starr senior fellow and director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is currently a senior fellow. He retired from the partnership of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison at the end of 2000 after 20 years of law practice focused on China. Mr Cohen has published several books on Chinese law and hundreds of scholarly articles on various topics. In 1990, he published Investment Law and Practice in Vietnam. Outside academia, Mr Cohen has served in government, first as an assistant US attorney in Washington, DC, from 1958 to 1959 and then as a full-time consultant to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1959. Mr Cohen is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale College (BA, 1951). He graduated in 1955 from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal.

Professor Fu specializes in criminal justice studies, human rights, and constitutional law in China. He has published widely in both local and international journals. His books include: Media Law in the People’s Republic of China (with Richard Cullen, 1996), Hong Kong’s Constitutional Debate: Conflict over Interpretation (edited with Johannes Chan and Y Ghai, 2000) (居港權引發的憲法爭論), National Security and Fundamental Freedoms: Hong Kong’s Article 23 Under Scrutiny (edited with Carole Petersen and Simon Young, 2005), and The Struggle for Coherence: Constitutional Interpretation in Hong Kong (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) (co-edited with Lison Harris and Simon Young). He is also the China Law editor for Hong Kong Law Journal. His current research includes the constitutional status of Hong Kong and its legal relations with mainland China, dispute resolution and the role of the courts, and criminal justice reform in China.

Ryan Goodman is Professor of Law and Co-Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. Prior to moving to NYU, Goodman was the inaugural Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and Director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal. He received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University. After law school, he clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He is a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law and the Board of Editors of International Theory. He is a member of the United States Department of State’s Advisory Committee on International Law and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the civil liberties and national security blog, JustSecurity.org. His research interests include: Laws of War, U.S. National Security Law and Policy, Use of Force, Human Rights, U.S. Foreign Policy and International Relations.   

Harold Hongju Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. He returned to Yale Law School in January 2013 after serving for nearly four years as the 22nd Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State. Professor Koh is one of the country’s leading experts in public and private international law, national security law, and human rights. He first began teaching at Yale Law School in 1985 and served as its fifteenth Dean from 2004 until 2009. From 2009 to 2013, he took leave as the Martin R. Flug ’55 Professor of International Law to join the State Department as Legal Adviser, service for which he received the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award. From 1993 to 2009, he was the Gerard C. & Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, and from 1998 to 2001, he served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Professor Koh has received thirteen honorary degrees and more than thirty awards for his human rights work, including awards from Columbia Law School and the American Bar Association for his lifetime achievements in international law. He has authored or co-authored eight books, published more than 180 articles, testified regularly before Congress, and litigated numerous cases involving international law issues in both U.S. and international tribunals. He is a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a member of the Council of the American Law Institute. He holds a B.A. degree from Harvard College and B.A. and M.A. degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was Developments Editor of the Harvard Law Review. Before coming to Yale, he served as a law clerk for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court and Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, worked as an attorney in private practice in Washington, and served as an Attorney-Adviser for the Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice.

Nigel Li received LL.M. degrees from Harvard in 1983 and National Taiwan University in 1980, after obtaining an LL.B. degree from Soochow University in 1977. In addition to his role as a practicing attorney specializing in dispute resolution and arbitration, media law, human and civil rights, international litigation and constitutional law, he is also an adjunct professor at both the Graduate School of Law of Soochow University and the Department of Political Science of National Taiwan University. He teaches Constitutional Law, Human Rights, ADR and International Arbitration. Currently serving as Chairman of the Chinese Arbitration Association, Taipei, Mr. Li has made considerable effort in raising the quality of transnational arbitration and has contributed greatly to cross-strait and international exchanges. At the same time, he is also registered as an arbitrator of The Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre and the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission.Over the years, Mr. Li has dedicated himself to pro bono work. He has served as President of the Taipei Bar Association and now sits on the Board of the Judicial Reform Foundation. His determination to preserve human rights and justice has led to his ardent involvement in numerous cases applying for the Grand Justices’ interpretation of the Constitution and his appointment as a Member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Rights..

Trevor Morrison is currently the Dean and Eric M. and Laurie B. Roth Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He was previously the Liviu Librescu Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he was also faculty co-director of the Center for Constitutional Governance and faculty co-chair of the Hertog Program on Law and National Security. He spent 2009 in the White House, where he served as associate counsel to President Barack Obama. Drawing on both his scholarship and work experience, he has developed particular renown for his expertise in constitutional law as practiced in the executive branch. Dean Morrison’s research and teaching interests are in constitutional law (especially separation of powers and federalism), federal courts, and the law of the executive branch. His scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, among others. From 2003 to 2008, Dean Morrison taught at Cornell Law School, and was a visiting associate professor at NYU Law in 2007. Before entering academia, he was a law clerk to Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (1998-99) and to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court (2002-03). Between those clerkships, he was a Bristow Fellow in the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of the Solicitor General (1999-2000), an attorney-advisor in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (2000-01), and an associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale) (2001-02). Dean Morrison received a B.A. (hons.) in history from the University of British Columbia in 1994, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1998. He was also a Richard Hofstadter Fellow in History at Columbia University. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law. He was awarded the Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching by the Columbia Law School Class of 2011, and he was elected Faculty Convocation Speaker by the Cornell Law School Class of 2007.

Sophie Richardson is the China director at Human Rights Watch. A graduate of the University of Virginia, the Hopkins-Nanjing Program, and Oberlin College, Dr. Richardson is the author of numerous articles on domestic Chinese political reform, democratization, and human rights in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Vietnam. She has testified before the European Parliament and the US Senate and House of Representatives. She has provided commentary to the BBC, CNN, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, National Public Radio, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Dr. Richardson is the author of China, Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (Columbia University Press, Dec. 2009), an in-depth examination of China’s foreign policy since 1954′s Geneva Conference, including rare interviews with policy makers.

David Wertime is a Senior Editor at Foreign Policy, where he covers Chinese media, politics, and Internet. He previously founded Tea Leaf Nation, a Chinese media analysis site which was recently acquired by the Washington Post Company (now Graham Holdings Co.). David first encountered China as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Fuling, and has lived and worked in Chongqing, Beijing, and Hong Kong. He graduated from Yale College in 2001 and from Harvard Law School in 2007, then practiced corporate law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York and Milbank, Tweed in Hong Kong before founding TLN. In addition to writing frequently about Chinese media, civil society, and foreign policy, David has appeared on Al Jazeera English, BBC television, Public Radio International, among other outlets. He was a 2012 Knight News Challenge finalist and an inaugural seed grant recipient of the Harvard Law School Public Venture Fund. He is a Truman National Security fellow, a ChinaFile fellow at the Asia Society, and a member of the National Committee on U.S. – China Relations. He is originally from the Philadelphia area and grew up in Jenkintown, PA.