Law Professor to Discuss Issues Regarding Fighting Terrorism in Hanify-Howland Lecture at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Ruth Wedgwood, the Edward B. Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy, and Director of the Program in International Law and Organization at the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, D.C., will deliver the 41st annual Hanify-Howland Memorial Lecture on Nov. 30 at 8 p.m. in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom at the College of the Holy Cross. The event, titled “Fighting Terrorism Within the Law,” is free and open to the public.

Wedgwood will talk about the problems of the “failure of deterrence” — both in criminal law and international strategy — in dealing with non-state actors such as al Qaeda and the difficulties of anticipation and interception, rather than waiting for events to unfold, in the required factual showings for use of force and application of criminal law. She will also address the attempted moral distinction between action and passivity — the assumption of some that it is morally preferable to refrain from action, where the foundation is uncertain, even at the cost of failing to protect against malevolent ends by other actors — measuring this against the new view about an affirmative “responsibility to protect.” She will also talk about the general chaos of battlefields as a challenge to the idea of predicated action and fact-finding that are characteristic of the law.

Wedgwood serves on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on International Law and the CIA’s Historical Review Panel. She also serves as the American member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Wedgwood has commented frequently on issues of terrorism and the law on National Public Radio, “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” and BBC, among other media outlets. She has testified before the Senate on issues of war crimes, Presidential war powers and trying Saddam Hussein.

At Johns Hopkins and at Yale, where she was previously professor of law, Wedgwood has taught courses and seminars on general public international law, the United Nations, global constitutionalism, international human rights, war crimes and terrorism, the law of armed conflict, constitutional foreign affairs power, international arbitration, and American legal history.