Ruth Wedgwood

Ruth Wedgwood
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Yale Law School Harvard University
Scientific career
Fields	International law
Institutions	Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies

Ruth Wedgwood holds the Edward B. Burling Chair in International Law and Diplomacy at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, D.C.

Family origins

She is the daughter of labor lawyer Morris P. Glushien, former general counsel of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union who served as a World War II cryptanalyst, and Anne Sorelle Williams, an artist and translator raised in Paris. In 1982 she married immunologist and pediatrician Josiah F. Wedgwood, a member of the Darwin-Wedgwood family.

Current career

As the Burling Professor, Dr. Wedgwood is the director of the program on international law and organizations at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. She teaches and writes in the fields of international law, international criminal law, United Nations politics and law, peacekeeping, the law of armed conflict, constitutional law and American foreign affairs power, comparative global constitutionalism, arbitration and investment law, and human rights law. The international law program under her direction also instructs students in international environmental law, competition law, financial regulatory law, trade law, Islamic law, and Chinese law.

She also serves as the U.S. member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, sitting in Geneva and New York (re-elected to a second term by the states parties in 2006), and as vice-chairman of Freedom House, a sixty year old NGO founded by Eleanor Roosevelt that promotes democracy and human rights. She clerked for renowned federal judge Henry J. Friendly on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court. She received her undergraduate education in economic history at Harvard and her legal education at Yale Law School. She was the executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and received the Peres Prize for the finest legal writing.

Since 1993, she has also served as a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law, and is a member of Davos World Economic Forum's Council on the International Global Agenda.

Professor Wedgwood was a member of the Yale Law School faculty for over a decade; a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, directing the Ford Foundation-funded diplomatic roundtable on the United Nations; and the Charles Stockton Professor of International Law at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. She has traveled widely in areas of post-conflict transition, and served as an independent expert for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

She has served as vice-president of the American Society of International Law; chairman of the Council on International Affairs of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; a member of the policy advisory group of the United Nations Association; and an expert consultant on the Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security in the 21st Century.

She has also served on the board of editors for the American Journal of International Law; the editorial advisory board of the World Policy Journal of the New School University; and the editorial board of The American Interest magazine.

She is a member of the American Law Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute for Strategic Studies, and the San Remo International Institute for Humanitarian Law.

Additional Background and education

• U.S. public delegate to Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
• U.S. delegate to the Munich Security Conference (Wehrkunde).
• Member of the Defense Policy Board and the CIA Historical Review Panel
• Director of studies at the Hague Academy for International Law in the Netherlands
• Visiting professor at University of Paris I (Sorbonne)
• Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy
• Senior fellow for international organizations at the Council on Foreign Relations
• Counsel to the head of the criminal division in the U.S. Department of Justice, chairing the attorney general’s working group on informant and undercover investigative guidelines, and consulting on issues of white collar crime, special prosecutor cases, intelligence policy, and the Classified Information Procedures Act
• Federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York (investigations, trials and appeals in criminal cases of public corruption in the Women's Infants and Childrens Program and the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, high-technology and weapons smuggling to Russia and North Korea, landlord arson in the Bronx and Harlem that destroyed more than 30 buildings, and interstate racketeering in the insurance industry, and espionage involving a Soviet bloc trade attache and leading to negotiations for the release of Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky
• Contributor to publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and The American Interest, as well as commentator on BBC, NBC, ABC, National Public Radio, and the Lehrer News Hours.
• A.B., Harvard; J.D., Yale