Dr. Ruth Wedgwood is a foreign policy realist who thinks international institutions still matter. With plain-spoken common sense, she has advised government leaders and written for the public on cutting-edge topics of United States foreign policy – how to fight terrorism within the law, how to promote human rights around the world, when and where the United States can legitimately use military force, how to reform the United Nations and UN peacekeeping, and whether the United States should join the International Criminal Court.

At Yale Law School and Johns Hopkins University (where she holds the Burling chair of international law and diplomacy), she has taught constitutional law, the law of armed conflict and war crimes, international law, arbitration, and United Nations politics and law. Dr. Wedgwood serves on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law, and the Central Intelligence Agency's Historical Review Panel. In Geneva, Switzerland, she also serves as the American member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, engaging countries around the world on issues of human rights. She was appointed as an independent expert in The Hague for the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in the prosecution of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war. She has taught at the University of Paris, served as a director of studies at the Hague Academy of International Law in the Netherlands, and will be a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2006.