Diane Desierto

Diane Desierto holds a joint appointment in the Keough School of Global Affairs and the Notre Dame Law School, where she is professor of law and LLM faculty director. She is also co-principal investigator of the Notre Dame Reparations Design and Compliance Lab, one of Kellogg's Policy and Practice Research labs. She specializes in international law, including international economic law, human rights, development, humanitarian law, comparative constitutional law, and maritime security.  Her research addresses those topics as well as dispute settlement and the evolving regional law of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Desierto has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 2018.

Desierto previously held law faculty appointments at the University of Hawaii and Peking University School of Transnational Law. She was a faculty fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and director of studies and faculty at The Hague Academy of International Law. She previously co-directed the ASEAN Law and Integration Center. She also worked as Yale Law Clerk at the International Court of Justice, as a legal advisor to former Philippines Senate President Edgardo J. Angara, and as a law reform consultant for the Philippines Constitutional Commission on Elections.

She has written more than 100 law review articles, book chapters, legal essays, and other publications and is the sole author/editor of three books (OUP, Martinus Nijhoff, UP Press), and co-author of two others (CUP, Routledge).  She serves in the Editorial Board of the European Journal of International Law and is Editor of its leading international law blog, EJIL:Talk!.

She serves as Legal Expert for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Open-Ended Working Group of States on the Right to Development, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the European External Action Service, the UNCITRAL Academic Forum on Reforming Investor-State Dispute Settlement, the Asian Development Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development.  She has acted as International Counsel on human rights and development disputes at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the UN Human Rights Committee, the Philippine Supreme Court and Southeast Asian regulatory bodies.

She earned JSD and LLM degrees from Yale University Law School and a JD and BS from the University of the Philippines.

ISP Advisee:
Rachel DeGaugh

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