International Law and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Kevin Jon Heller is Professor of International Law and Security at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Military Studies, which is part of the Department of Political Science. He is an Academic Member of Doughty Street Chambers in London and a Member of the Advisory Board the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales. He also currently serves as Special Advisor to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on War Crimes.

Prof. Heller’s books include The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (OUP, 2011) and four co-edited volumes: The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law (Stanford, 2010), The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials (OUP, 2013), the Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law (OUP, 2018), and Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories  (OUP, 2021). He also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the international-law blog Opinio Juris, where he has blogged for more than 17 years.

Prof. Heller has been involved in the practice of international law throughout his career, most notably acting as one of Radovan Karadzic's formally-appointed legal associates at the ICTY; serving as the plaintiffs’ sole expert witness in Salim v Mitchell, a successful Alien Tort Statute case against the psychologists who designed and administered the CIA’s torture program; functioning as UNITAD’s Special Expert for International Criminal and Humanitarian Law, where he designed training programmes for the Iraqi judges, prosecutors, and investigators involved in Da’esh trials; and acting as legal advisor to and expert witness for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was one of the defendants in the 9/11 trial at Guantanamo Bay. 

Professor Lederman was Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2009 to 2010, and an Attorney Advisor in OLC from 1994-2002. From 1988 to 2004, he was an attorney at Bredhoff & Kaiser, where his practice consisted principally of federal litigation, including appeals, on behalf of labor unions, employees and pension funds. In 2008, with David Barron, he published a two-part article in the Harvard Law Review examining Congress’s authority to regulate the Commander in Chief’s conduct of war.

Prior to rejoining the Department of Justice, he was a regular contributor to several blogs and web sites, including Balkinization, SCOTUSblog, Opinio Juris, and Slate, writing principally on issues relating to separation of powers, war powers, torture, detention, interrogation, international law, treaties, executive branch lawyering, statutory interpretation and the First Amendment. He served as law clerk to Chief Judge Jack B. Weinstein on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and to Judge Frank M. Coffin on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Dr. Khoury-Bisharat is a lecturer in Ono Academic College School of Law and the Academic Director of Haifa Campus, and adjunct lecturer in the Law Faculty, Tel Aviv University. Her main research interests are in the fields of public international law, international criminal law, transitional justice and human rights. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford.

Sarah Wildman is an op-ed page editor at the New York Times. She is the co-creator, producer, and host of Foreign Policy’s First Person podcast.

Prior to joining FP as a deputy editor, she was the global identities and borders writer at Vox, a position she originated. Sarah Wildman has lived in and reported from Paris, Vienna, Madrid, Washington, Jerusalem and Berlin. She was a Dart Center Ochberg fellow (a project of the Columbia School of Journalism) in 2015 and the 2014 Barach Non Fiction Writing Fellow at the Wesleyan Writers Conference. Wildman won the 2010 Peter R. Weitz Prize, from the German Marshall Fund, a prize awarded for "excellence and originality," in European coverage, a 2011 Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association for commentary, and a 2008 Lowell Thomas Award Winner for travel writing. 

Wildman has received numerous grants and competitve fellowships including an Arthur F. Burns Fellowship in Berlin, an American Council on Germany Fellowship in Berlin, a Milena Jesenská fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism (now called the International Reporting Project).  In March 2013 she received a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant to report on the future of Jerusalem. Wildman wrote Paper Love, for Riverhead/Penguin, while a visiting scholar at the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

Wildman is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Slate, and the New Yorker online. She has been on staff at The New Republic, a senior correspondent at The American Prospect and the Washington correspondent for The Advocate. Her stories have appeared in the Daily Beast, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Nation,The Washington Post, Travel and Leisure, New York, Departures, The Christian Science Monitor, Elle, Marie Claire, O the Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Glamour, and Jerusalem Report, among others.  

She lives in Washington, DC with her partner and their two children.