Faculty Focus
Professor Curtis Bradley speaks at a launch event for his book, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Foreign Relations Law, held in The Hague on July 2 in conjunction with the DukeLeiden Institute in Global and Transnational Law
With Oxford Handbook, Bradley lays groundwork for new field of comparative foreign relations law
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Duke Law Magazine • Fall 2019
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or Curtis Bradley, publication of The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Foreign Relations Law — of which he is editor — represents the culmination of a five year scholarly effort and the realization of a lofty goal: to lay the groundwork for a new field of study and teaching. “I have been writing about and teaching U.S. foreign relations law since I started in academia more than 20 years ago, and I have become increasingly interested in the extent to which other countries face similar issues to those that we think about here, including how much authority to distribute between the legislative branch and the executive branch in handling foreign relations,” said Bradley, the William Van Alstyne Professor of Law and Professor of Public Policy Studies. “This project stems, in part, from my desire to learn more and find out whether there were comparisons and contrasts that would be interesting.” A founder and co-director of Duke’s Center for International and Comparative Law, Bradley’s scholarly expertise spans the areas of international law in the U.S. legal system, the constitutional law of foreign affairs, and federal jurisdiction, and his courses include International Law, Foreign Relations Law, and Federal Courts. In addition to directing the Duke-Leiden Institute in Global and Transnational Law for the past two years and serving on the executive board of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, he is co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) and served as a reporter on the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States, which was published last November. He is also a longtime member of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on International Law.
