Wedgwood comes to SAIS from the Yale Law School, where she has been on the faculty since 1986.She also serves as a senior fellow for International Organizations and Law at the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Secretary of State s Advisory Committee on Public International Law and the chairman of the research and studies committee of the American Society of International Law. Earlier in her career, Wedgwood was law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and worked as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, serving as chief counsel on cases involving nuclear espionage, terrorism and the smuggling of equipment to the Soviet bloc and to belligerents in the Iran-Iraq war. She received her bachelor s degree from Harvard University and a J.D. from Yale. In addition, teaching at an institution where foreign policy is the center of discussion was very attractive. I d like to demystify international law, both for foreign policy analysts and people contemplating business careers.
International law is shaped by an interesting mixture of politics and principle.
The real behavior of states matters as much as what states say in polite company. And international law remains the vernacular tongue of dispute resolution, used by states to make claims, rebuff their adversaries and reach workable compromises. American foreign policy operators and diplomats, as well as business people, need to know how to operate more effectively in multilateral institutions, for the sake of national as well as common interest. Academic international law scholars and political scientists are interested in why states join multilateral institutions in which they can t expect to win all rounds of play. For American foreign policy analysts, the challenge is designing international institutions that are consistent with American interests but that may enhance stability in areas where the United States can t act alone.