Alexandra Huneeus

Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law

Contact

alexandra.huneeus@wisc.edu
608/265-1149
975 Bascom Mall, 7110 Law Building, Madison, WI, USA, 53706-1399

Curriculum Vitae

@Alex_Huneeus

Education

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
J.D. Berkeley Law (Boalt Hall)
B.A. University of California, Berkeley

Biography

Alexandra Huneeus’ scholarship focuses on international law and human rights, with emphasis on Latin America. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of International Law, Harvard International Law Journal, Law and Social Inquiry, Yale Journal of International Law, Leiden International Law Journal, and by Cambridge University Press. She is Evjue Bascom Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Law, Society and Justice at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received her PhD, JD and BA from University of California, Berkeley, and was a post-doc at Stanford University's Center on Development, Democracy and the Rule of Law.

In 2017, Professor Huneeus was named to serve a ten-year term as Foreign Expert Jurist in the Colombian Jurisdicción para la Paz (JEP), a court created as part of the Colombian peace process. At UW, Professor Huneeus currently serves as Director of the Center for Law, Society and Justice. She is Co-Chair of the University of Wisconsin Human Rights Program, which she co-founded, and Director of the Global Legal Studies Program. She is a member of the American Society of International Law and the Law and Society Association. She has served on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law, and of Law and Social Inquiry. Previously, she has served on the Board of Trustees of the Law and Society Association and the American Society for Comparative Law, and as section chair for the Midwest Political Science Association (Law and Courts) and for the ASIL Midwest Interest Group on International law.

In 2019 she was awarded the best paper prize by the International Society of Public Law. In 2013, she was awarded the American Association for Law Schools Scholarly Papers Prize, as well as the American Society for Comparative Law Award for Younger Scholars (for two different articles), and in 2014 she was awarded an NSF grant to explore the impact of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on domestic prosecutions of state atrocity.

Before becoming a scholar, she worked as journalist, and has written for Wired News, Business Week International, The San Francisco Chronicle, El Mercurio, and other media.

Follow her on twitter: @Alex_Huneeus

Scholarship & Publications

SSRN

Law Repository

Research Interests

Public international law
Comparative law
Latin America
Human rights
Judicial Politics

Activities

Alexandra Huneeus submitted an amicus brief and participated in the hearing on climate justice and human rights before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights held April 23-25, 2024, in Barbados. The Court has been asked to issue an advisory opinion on the obligations of states in face of the climate emergency.
Alexandra Huneeus presented "Should International Humanitarian Law Be More Ecocentric?" on Dec. 11, 2023. Huneeus was serving as visiting professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris, and gave the talk during her stay. The paper presents a new paradigm for approaching environmental matters in international law, drawn from Colombia's experience in making peace after a 50-year civil war, with emphasis on the experience of Indigenous and tribal peoples.
Alexandra Huneeus participated in a seminar on Chile's constitutional draft with members of the Chilean Constituent Council and Experts Committee, who are drafting a new charter. The event was sponsored by Idea International and Centro de Estudios Publicos, and took place in Santiago, Chile June 19-20, 2023.
Alexandra Huneeus co-edited "Introducción Al Simposio Sobre Derecho Internacional Latinoamericano" alongside Alejandro Chehtman (Law School of the University Torcuato Di Tella) and Sergio Puig (University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law). The bilingual symposium was published online by Cambridge University Press on Oct. 17, 2022. Read the article.
Alexandra Huneeus wrote an article on how Colombia's transitional justice mechanism has lessons for the International Criminal Court on how to bring Indigenous law and perspectives into international criminal law. Read the article.
Alexandra Huneeus presented "La JEP, el territorio como víctima, y la Constitución" during a Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia conference on Constitutional and Criminal Law on April 25, 2022, and during the the "Libertades, democracia y derecho penal desde la justicia transicional, la policía, la inteligencia artificial" conference at the Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia on April 26, 2022.
Alex Huneeus and co-author Pablo Rueda Saiz published "Territory as a Victim of Armed Conflict" to SSRN. Read the abstract and download the paper.
Alexandra Huneeus has been named co-chair for the Law & Society Association's annual meeting, scheduled for May 2021 in Chicago. This year's theme is "Crisis, Healing, Re-imagining."
Alexandra Huneeus's article, "Territory as a Victim of Colombia's War," was published in EJIL:Talk!, a blog of the European Journal of International Law.
Heinz Klug is chairing the search-and-screen committee to find a new UW Law dean. Other committee members include: Michelle Behnke, Roman Gierok, Erica Halverson, Alexandra Huneeus, Richard Monette, Yaron Nili, Kim Peterson, Howard Schweber, Mitra Sharafi, Susannah Tahk, Janice Toliver, Kathryn VandenBosch, Steven Wright, and Jason Yackee.
Alexandra Huneeus, Mitra Sharafi and Nina Varsava were selected for honorary membership into the Order of the Coif, a scholastic society that encourages excellence in legal education. Sixteen recent UW Law graduates also received Order of the Coif honors for 2019.
Alexandra Huneeus gave the keynote at the 4th Supreme Court Project Conference, held Oct. 9, 2019 at Torcuato di Tella University in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her presentation was titled “A Regional History of Human Rights: The Rise of the African, American and European Courts of Human Rights (1945-2018).”
Alexandra Huneeus co-edited a symposium for AJIL Unbound, now available online: "Non-State Actors and New Technologies in Atrocity Prevention." She also wrote the introduction to the symposium (with Larissa van den Herik).
Alexandra Huneeus has published a symposium titled the "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at 70 and the Future of Being Human," in AJIL Unbound, a publication of the American Society of International Law. The symposium, honoring the Universal Declaration's 70th birthday on Dec. 10, includes an article by Alta Charo, "Germline Engineering and Human Rights."
Alexandra Huneeus is co-editor and author of "Cultures of Legality: Judicialization and Political Activism in Latin America," published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.