David J. Scheffer
David J. Scheffer is the Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law at Northwestern University, where he is Director of the Center for International Human Rights and teaches courses on international human rights law, international criminal law, corporate compliance, and the social mandate. He is also the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Expert on UN Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials.
During the second term of the Clinton administration, he served as Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, leading the US delegation in the UN talks that established the International Criminal Court and negotiating US responses to atrocities around the world. He also headed the Atrocities Prevention Inter-Agency Working Group. During the first term of the Clinton administration, he served as Senior Adviser and Counsel to the US Representative to the UN, Dr. Madeleine Albright, and served from 1993 through 1996 on the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council.
His previous positions include Senior Associate in International and National Security Law at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Senior Consultant to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, and associate attorney with the international law firm of Coudert Brothers. He has taught at Georgetown University Law Center, Duke University School of Law, and Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and has published extensively on international legal and political issues. In December 2011, he published All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals.
He is a member of the New York and District of Columbia Bars, the American Society of International Law (formerly serving on the Executive Council), and the Council on Foreign Relations and a former chairman of the Board of Directors of the International Law Students Association. A graduate in government and economics of Harvard College and of the law programs at Oxford (where he was a Knox Fellow) and Georgetown universities, he was named a “Top Global Thinker of 2011” by Foreign Policy magazine.
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