Speaker Bios
Clifford Ando is Professor in the Departments of Classics, History, and New Testament and Early Christian Literature at the University of Chicago. His work concentrates on the history of government, law and religion. In addition to some two dozen articles, he is the author of two books, "Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire" and "The Matter of the Gods," both published by the University of California Press, and editor of two more, "Roman Religion," published by Edinburgh University Press, and, with Jörg Rüpke, "Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome," published by Franz Steiner.
Lauren Benton is Professor of History at New York University and Chair of the History Department at NYU. Her scholarly interests focus mainly on the comparative legal history of European empires, and her publications include Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which won the James Willard Hurst Prize and the World History Association Book Prize. She is currently completing Anomalies of Empire: Law, Geographic Imagination, and the Problem of Imperial Sovereignty, a study of the legal conflicts shaping notions of territorial sovereignty in European empires between 1500 and 1900. Benton received her Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from Johns Hopkins University, and her A.B. from Harvard University.
Emmanuelle Jouannet is currently Professor of International Law at the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Subsidiary-Director of the CERDIN de Paris I, Legal Responsible of the Master in International Law and Scientific Responsible for l’Ecole doctorale de Droit international et européen de l’Université Paris I. She teaches and makes researches in International law, Judicial Law, International Law of Human Rights, History and Philosophy of Law.
Randall Lesaffer (Bruges, Belgium 1968) studied law and history in Ghent and Leuven. After obtaining his Ph D at Leuven, he was appointed full professor of legal history at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He also teaches cultural history at the Leuven Law School and international law at the Royal Defense Colleges of the Belgian Armed Forces. Lesaffer's publications deal with the early-modern law of nations as it appears from state practice.
Liliana Obregón
LL.B. (1990), Universidad de los Andes Law School
M.A. (1993), The School of Advanced International Studies ( SAIS ) of the Johns Hopkins University
LL.M. (1997), Harvard Law School
S.J.D. (2002), Harvard Law School
Liliana Obregón is Associate Professor of law at Universidad de los Andes Law School in Bogotá , Colombia where she also directs the international law program. She specializes in the history and theory of international law and international institutions in Latin America . She earned her law degree from the Universidad de los Andes where she minored in history and was an assistant researcher for the Center for International Studies (CEI) on issues of drug trafficking, international human rights and international humanitarian law. She also co-authored two books on the regional integration policies between Colombia and Venezuela . She then did her Masters in International Affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University in Bologna , Italy (1991-1992) and Washington D.C. (1992-1993) as a Ford Foundation Scholar. Her fields of specialization were in Latin American Studies and International Economics. After graduating from SAIS , Liliana worked at the NGOs Conservation International and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL). In 1996 Liliana went to Harvard Law School to continue her studies with the support of the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program. She finished her LL.M. in 1997 with a paper on international drug trafficking and human rights, under the supervision of Professor Henry Steiner. During her LL.M. year she also co-authored a book chapter titled “In Search of Hope: The Plight of Displaced Colombians” published by the Brookings Institution. After being admitted in the SJD program at Harvard Law School in 1997 she began to work more closely on the revisiting the history of international legal thought in Latin America, under the guidance of her doctoral adviser David Kennedy, and with the additional suggestions of readers Duncan Kennedy and Doris Sommer also of Harvard University. While at Harvard Liliana also worked on a series of entries for the Encyclopedia Africana directed by Professors Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah and published by Perseus Books and Encarta Microsoft. Liliana successfully finished writing her doctoral dissertation (“Nineteenth Century Criollo Interventions in International Law”) in 2002 as a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin Law School and Global Studies Program. In 2003 she returned to work and live in her native Bogotá and has been teaching, writing and participating in international conferences. Articles and book chapters that are based on her dissertation have been published in the Wisconsin Journal of International Law , University of Pittsburgh series Criticas , Cambridge University Press book International Law and Its Others , Third World Quarterly and the Leiden Journal of International Law .
Ileana Porras is visiting Professor at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University where she teaches European Union Law, the International Law of Sustainable Development and Property Law. Her scholarship in international law has been primarily concerned with issues of violence, colonialism, trade, and the environment. Her recent article Constructing International Law in the East Indian Seas: Property, Sovereignty, Commerce and War in Hugo Grotius' 'De Iure Praedae'-The Law of Prize and Booty, or "On How to Distinguish Merchants from Pirates, (2006) is part of a broader exploration of the intersection of sovereignty, trade and the corporate form in the seventeenth century. Her most recent work has focused on the connection between liberalism and cosmopolitanism, and the management of religion within the EU. She has taught at Boston College, Paris V, and at the University of Utah, where she was Professor of law from 1993-1999.
John Richardson studied for his DPhil at Trinity College , Oxford from 1968 to 1972. He held a Lectureship in Ancient History at Exeter College , Oxford from 1969 to 1972, when he took up a Lectureship in Ancient History at the University of St Andrews , which he held until 1987. He was appointed to the first chair of Classics at the University of Edinburgh in 1987, which he held until retiring in 2002. He was Head of the Department of Classics from 1987 to 1992 and again in 1998 to 1999. From 1992 to 1997 he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Provost of the Faculty Group of Arts, Divinity and Music. He has held an honorary Professorship in the University of Durham since 2004. He is also a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church, and an Honorary Canon of St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh.
His main research interests are in Roman imperialism, and especially Roman Spain; and in Roman law. He is currently completing a book for Cambridge University Press on the development of ideas of empire, traced through linguistic usage from the third century BC to the second century AD, entitled The Language of Empire. He is also the General Editor of the new Edinburgh History of Ancient Rome, an eight volume series covering the history of Rome from earliest times to the beginnings of the Byzantine Empire , of which he will write a volume on the emperor Augustus. In 1998, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies in the University of London . From 1998 to 2001 he was President of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, and is currently one of its Vice Presidents. From 1998 to 2002 he was Convener of the Research Panel on Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology of the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and in 2001/2 a member of the AHRB Board of Management.
Kaius Tuori is Hauser Research Scholar and Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law. His research interests include legal history, Roman law, legal anthropology, classical archaeology, and their intellectual history. His book "Ancient Roman Lawyers and Modern Legal Ideals", published by Vittorio Klostermann, explores how modern law affected the history of ancient Roman law. Additionally, his work has been published in The Journal of Legal History, Revue internationale des droits de l'Antiquite and the Legal History Review. He holds a doctorate in Law and a M.A. in History from his studies at the universities of Helsinki, Finland, and La Sapienza in Rome, Italy.
http://blogit.helsinki.fi/katuori
Christopher Warren is a Harper-Schmidt fellow in the Humanities in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. For his doctorate in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, he studied intersections among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, Renaissance humanist practice, and the history of international law. Arising out of this work, the book he is currently preparing for publication, Literature and the Law of Nations in England, 1585-1673, traces the Roman-law concept of the law of nations through literary works by John Milton, William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Thomas Hobbes, and Hugo Grotius, among others. An article entitled "When Self-Preservation Bids: Approaching Milton, Hobbes, and Dissent" recently appeared in English Literary Renaissance (Winter, 2007), and an article on Hobbes and the history of international law is forthcoming in The Seventeenth Century. His related interests include rhetoric, the history of political thought, Renaissance civic humanism, and the history of the book.
Anne Orford is Chair of Law and Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the University of Melbourne. She researches in the areas of international law and legal theory, with a focus on the international legal legacies of European imperialism in international economic law, the law relating to the use of force and human rights law. Her publications include Reading Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law (2003) and the edited collection International Law and its Others (2006). Anne has held visiting positions at Lund University and New York University, and has presented lectures by invitation at a range of institutions including the Central European University, the European University Institute, Stockholm University, the University of Helsinki, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the University of Toronto, the University of Vienna and the World Trade Organization. She is currently the holder of a research-only Australian Professorial Fellowship, awarded by the Australian Research Council for work on a research project entitled Cosmopolitanism and the Future of International Law from 2007 to 2011.
Jennifer Pitts teaches politics at the University of Chicago . Her research interests include modern political and social thought, particularly British and French thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the author of A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France ( Princeton , 2005). She is currently writing a book, tentatively entitled Boundaries of the International, which explores European debates about legal relations with extra-European societies, and the challenges of cross-cultural legal and moral judgment, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
John Fabian Witt is Professor of Law and History at Columbia Law School and Columbia University, where he teaches and writes about the history of law in America. He is the author of two books, most recently Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law (Harvard Press, 2007), which explores law and and American national identity through the little-known stories of key moments in American history. His prizewinning first book, The Accidental Republic : Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Harvard Press, 2004), rediscovered the forgotten crisis of industrial accidents that transformed the institutions of American law at the turn of the twentieth century. Professor Witt's articles have appeared in the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, the New York Times, Slate, the Washington Post, the Yale Law Journal, and elsewhere. Witt joined the Columbia faculty in 2001 after clerking for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City. He received his B.A. (1994), J.D. (1999), and Ph.D. in history (2000) from Yale University. He is currently working on a book on Francis Lieber and the history of the law of war in the United States.