Session Description

Anna Spain Bradley is the MacArthur Foundation Chair in International Justice and Human Rights and Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She has over a decade of continuous leadership experience in higher education, including prior service as UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Professor Spain Bradley’s research focuses on international law, human rights and peace. She is the author of Global Racism: A Challenge for the World (Oxford University Press, forthcoming October 2026), which articulates racism as a universally available form of oppression operating on a global scale and posing a serious threat to humanity. The book builds upon her law review article Human Rights Racism (2019), identifying racism as an undefined violation of human rights under international law. Spain Bradley’s first book, Human Choice in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021), challenges traditional assumptions about rationality in legal decision making by introducing insights from neuroscience to the study of international legal and political decision making. She is also co-editor of International Dispute Resolution (3rd ed., Carolina Academic Press, 2021) and the author of numerous law review articles and essays on the United Nations Security Council, international courts, and the peaceful resolution of disputes. Professor Spain Bradley’s scholarship has been recognized with the 2018 Gamm Justice Award for outstanding contributions to justice and the 2014 Francis Lieber Award from the American Society of International Law for exceptional scholarship on the law of war. Her current scholarly projects examine the legal history and doctrinal development of racism in international law, judicial emotion at the International Court of Justice, and the future of peace and world order. She advances her research through collaborations with the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and the University of Hamburg’s Institute of Law and Economics. She has a distinguished record of public service and international leadership. In 2024, she was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden to the World Bank ICSID Panel of Conciliators. In 2021, she was appointed as a Legal Expert to the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee addressing the prevention of racist and xenophobic discrimination. She was also elected Vice President of the American Society of International Law and previously served on its Executive Council for two terms.