Patricia Wald, who served for two decades on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and also was U.S. Judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague, Netherlands, will deliver the 14th Annual Raymond and Beverly Sackler Distinguished Lecture in Human Rights.
Her talk, “Perplexing Predicaments in Human Rights Law: Women, Terror, and Tribunals,” will take place at Konover Auditorium in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, beginning at 4 p.m on Monday, March 3.
Wald received her bachelor’s degree from Connecticut College and her law degree from Yale Law School, were she was editor of the Law Journal. She began her career as a law clerk to Judge Jerome Frank of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
She was an associate in the Washington, D.C. firm of Arnold, Fortas & Porter; an attorney in the Office of Criminal Justice of the Department of Justice; attorney for Neighborhood Legal Services; member of the District of Columbia Crime Commission; co-director of the Ford Foundation’s Project on Drug Abuse; attorney with the Center for Law and Social Policy; and litigation director of the Mental Health Law Project.In 1977, Wald was appointed Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs in the U.S. Department of Justice; and in 1979 President Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where she served until her retirement in 1999. From 1999 to 2001, she served on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, where she rendered significant decisions in the field of international humanitarian law.From 2002 to 2004, she was chair of the Open Society Justice Initiative; and from 2004 to 2005, was a member of the President’s Commission on U.S. Intelligence Capabilities Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction.Wald is a council member and former first vice president of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
She is the author of Law and Poverty (1965), and co-author of Bail in the United States (1964) and Dealing with Drug Abuse (1973). She has also published many articles on a wide range of legal subjects.Wald is a fellow of the American Philosophical Society and a former member of the executive board of the American Bar Association’s Central European and Eurasian Institute.She received the American Bar Association Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award; the annual award of the Environmental Law Institution; and the annual award of the International Human Rights Law Group.
She has received many honorary degrees from universities and law schools, including most recently the degree of Doctor of Law at Yale University.