Talk:Ruth Wedgwood

Major Overhaul

This page was mostly written by a single user (lobsterpound) a couple of years ago in a manner that is not consistent with Wikipedia's guidelines for biographies of living persons. I've made some edits to attain a more neutral point of view, remove trivial details, and add citations.

I'm out of time to work on this right now, but I felt uncomfortable leaving the "current career" section dominated by detailed, biased, and unsourced content. I'm providing it below in the hope that I or others can source the information and re-add it to the article. Glibzy (talk) 16:30, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

From the "Current Career" Section:

Since 1993, Wedgwood has served as a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committees on International Law, the CIA Historical Review Board, the Pentagon Defense Policy Board and the Davos World Economic Forum's Council on the International Global Agenda. She was U.S. delegate to the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe, and is currently a member of the panel roster of conciliators and arbitrators of the World Bank Group International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes.

Earlier in her career, she was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, serving as chief counsel in headline investigations of Soviet Bloc espionage, overseas smuggling of controlled military technology, a landlord arson ring that destroyed dozens of occupied buildings in the Bronx and Harlem and vicitimized working-class families as well as Lloyd's of London and other insurance syndicates, Wall Street insider trading, corporate fraud, the Weather Underground, and the "G-Man Crew" and "Five-Percenters" youth gangs in New York City. As counsel to the chief of the Department of Justice Criminal Division, Wedgwood designed the trial procedures in the Kampiles spy satellite case that became the model for the Classified Information Procedures Act, and chaired a Justice Department-FBI working group to tackle procedures for undercover operations, informant use, and predicates for intrusive techniques in ordinary criminal investigations, in the aftermath of the Abscam case. She was also an adviser on Special Prosecutor criminal investigations, including the "Peanutgate" investigation of Carter adviser Bert Lance and the investigation of White House personnel involved in Studio 57.

In her teaching career, before coming to SAIS, Professor Wedgwood was a tenured member of the Yale Law School faculty, the Charles Stockton Professor of International Law at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, a visiting professor at the University of Paris I Sorbonne, the George H.W. Bush Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, directing the Ford Foundation-funded diplomatic roundtable on the United Nations during the tenure of U.N. Secretary-Generals Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan. She has traveled widely in areas of post-conflict transition in the Balkans and South Asia, and also served as an independent legal expert on issues of command responsibility in the prosecution of Tihomir Blaskic before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Wedgwood has led various non-profit, academic and policy groups, including as vice-president of the American Society of International Law; chair of the Council on International Affairs and the Committee on International Security Affairs of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; chair of the section on international law of the Association of American Law Schools; a member of the policy advisory group of the United Nations Association; expert consultant on the Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security in the 21st Century; and academic member of the American Society of International Law's Task Force on the U.S. relationship to the International Criminal Court. She is currently president of the American Branch of the International Law Association, and president-elect of the world-wide ILA.

Wedgwood has also written in American constitutional history, notably, "The Revolutionary Martyrdom of Jonathan Robbins", 100 Yale Law Journal 229 (1990), a study of early competing theories of the foreign affairs power that has won praise from historians as diverse as Joyce Appleby, Eugene Genovese, Bernard Bailyn, and Gerald Gunther.

As an internationally-known writer and thought-leader, Professor Wedgwood also serves on the board of editors for the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of Strategic Studies, and The American Interest magazine; the editorial advisory board of The National Interest magazine, the World Policy Journal of the New School University, and the National Defense University's Center for Complex Operations Prism security studies journal.

Professor Wedgwood has discussed foreign policy challenges and international law on the BBC, National Public Radio, the PBS News Hour, MSNBC, al Jazeera, and the Diane Rehm and Kojo Nnamdi shows; and writes for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Forbes, and other periodicals. She has delivered the Pope John XXIII Lecture at the Catholic University and the Hanify-Howland Memorial Lecture at the College of the Holy Cross on issues of the laws of war and human rights.

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

From the "International Law Views" section

Professor Wedgwood has testified before the U.S. Congress on issues including United Nations reform, protection of U.S. troops abroad under status of forces agreements, and U.S. human rights policy. In June 2010, on MSNBC daytime news, Wedgwood appeared to take the position that the Israeli Defense Forces had the legal right under the Law of the Sea to enforce its blockade against the Gaza flotilla, while in international waters, en route to the Gaza strip.

References