Director
Professor Gregory Fox is the Director of the Program for International Legal Studies. Professor Fox is a widely cited authority on international law and international organizations and a leader in a variety of academic and professional organizations.
Professor Fox joined the Wayne Law faculty in 2002. He began his legal career in the litigation department of Hale & Dorr (now Wilmer Hale) in Boston, where he worked on one of the early cases brought under the Alien Tort Statute, Forti v. Suarez-Mason. Following a clerkship for Judge Alan Nevas of the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut, Professor Fox received two research fellowships that allowed him to move into legal academia: a Senior Fellowship at the Center for International Studies at New York University Law School and a MacArthur Foundation/Social Science Research Council Fellowship in International Peace and Security. During the fellowships he published "The Right to Political Participation in International Law" in the Yale International Law Journal, one of the 10 most cited articles ever published in the Yale Journal. The question explored in that article – how international law should assimilate notions of democratic legitimacy – has been a consistent theme of his scholarship.
Over the course of his career Professor Fox has established relationships with a variety of important institutions in international law. He has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and Public International Law in Heidelberg, Germany and the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School. In Spring 2009 he was a visiting fellow at the Lauterpacht Center for International Law at Cambridge University (UK). He is a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law and the founding Chair of the Committee on International Human Rights of the State Bar of Michigan. In 2008 he became an expert consultant to the International Committee of the Red Cross for its project on the future of occupation law.
Professor Fox is the editor (with Wayne Law Professor Brad Roth) of Democratic Governance and International Law (Cambridge 2000) and the author of Humanitarian Occupation (Cambridge 2008). He has also published widely on the international law of occupation, the development of democratic institutions in post-conflict states and the role of the UN Security Council in promoting democracy. His current research focuses on exit strategies of occupying powers and on the relationship between violations of national law and the validity of a state's international legal acts.
In addition to his academic work, Professor Fox has served as counsel in several international cases. He was co-counsel to the State of Eritrea in the Zuqar-Hanish Islands arbitration with the Republic of Yemen, which determined the status of a group of islands in the southern Red Sea. He also represented a group of Eritreans in U.S. federal court who were forcibly deported from Ethiopia in 1998 and had their property confiscated by the Ethiopian government. And he was counsel in several Alien Tort Statute cases in addition to the Forti case.
Professor Fox holds a B.A. in history with highest honors from Bates College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his J.D. from New York University. For Professor Fox's full CV, please click here.