Ambassador Dennis Ross, Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; Special Middle East Coordinator in the Clinton Administration; Director of the Policy Planning Staff in the first Bush Administration

Bargaining and Compromise in Constitutional Drafting
11:30am-1:00pm | 245A
Moderator: Kim Lane Scheppele, Director, Program on Law and Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University and Faculty Fellow, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Andrew Arato, Professor, The New School for Social Research

Said Arjomand, Professor, State University of New York, Stony Brook

Barnett Rubin, Director of Studies, New York University Center for International Cooperation and former special advisor to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi

Karol Soltan, Associate Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland and Deputy Director of Political and Constitutional Affairs, UNTAET, East Timor

Dr. Hamid Al Bayati, was appointed Iraq’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in April 2006. Prior to his current appointment, Dr. Al Bayati served for two years, from 2004 to 2006, as Iraq’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for Political Affairs and Bilateral Relations. In a related appointment that began in November 2004, he remains the head of the Iraqi Centre for Strategic Studies. From August 2003 to April 2004, he was an adviser to a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, Sayed Abdul Aziz Al Hakim. From May to August 2003, he was an adviser to the late Ayatollah Mohamad Baqir Al Hakim. From 1995 to 2002, Dr. Al Bayati was a board member of INDICT, a British organization that collected evidence about the alleged crimes of Saddam Hussein and his aides. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974 from Baghdad University, and his masters degree in language and philosophy in 1980 from Cairo University, Egypt. He received his doctorate degree in politics in 1990 from Manchester University, United Kingdom.

Andrew Arato
Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory, The New School for Social Research

Professor Arato’s areas of interest include the Frankfurt School, the history of social thought and theories of East European societies and social movements. Arato’s research has focused on the sociology of rights, theory of society-type societies and constitutions and democracy. Professor Arato has extensive experience in the Iraqi constitutional process. His recent writings include Sistani v. Bush: Constitutional Politics in Iraq, The Occupation of Iraq and the Difficult Transition from Dictatorship, and Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy.

Said Arjomand
Professor of Sociology, State University of New York, Stony Brook

Professor Arjomand was the founder and first President of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (1996-2002) and Editor of International Sociology (1998-2003). He is an expert on international sociology and the role of religion in constitutional processes. He is the author of numerous books on the constitutionalism in the Middle East. He is presently writing a book on the history of Shi’a constitutionalism.

Nathan Brown
Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University
Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Nathan Brown is an expert on Arab politics. Brown’s areas of interest are in Egyptian and Palestinian politics, legal reform in the modern Middle East, and processes of democratization. He has recently been a member of the international advisory committee on drafting the Palestinian constitution and consultant to the UNDP’s program on governance in the Arab world. Professor Brown’s recent books include Resuming Arab Palestine and Constitutions in a Non-Constitutional World: Arab Basic Laws and Prospects for Accountable Government.

William Burke-White
Assistant Professor of Law, Penn Law

William Burke-White’s research interests are at the intersection of international law and international politics. He has written widely on the structure of international legal regimes, the effectiveness of international courts and tribunals, investor-state arbitration, international criminal law and transitional justice. His scholarship addresses the operation of international tribunals, post conflict justice systems, the International Criminal Court, human rights, sovereign bankruptcy, amnesty legislation and the “international constitutional moment” after September 11.

Ambassador Peter Galbraith
Former US Ambassador to Croatia and Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

Peter Woodard Galbraith is a former United States diplomat. Galbraith worked for Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, and served on the staff of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1979 to 1993, where he published many reports about Iraq and took a special interest in Kurdistan. In 1993, he was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Croatia by President Bill Clinton. He later served as United Nations ambassador in East Timor. He taught at the National War College (1999, 2001-2003). Galbraith favors the independence of Kurdistan, and has worked with Kurdish leaders, including Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, toward that end. In 2003, he resigned from U.S. government after 24 years of service in order to be able to criticize U.S. Iraq policy more freely.

Currently senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Peter Galbraith is the author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (2006), which argues that the U.S.’s “main error” in Iraq has been “wishful thinking” and advocates acceptance of a “partition” of Iraq into three parts as part a new U.S. “strategy based on the reality of Iraq” (The End of Iraq, pp. 4, 12, 222, 224).

Najmaldin O. Karim, M.D.
FACS President, Washington Kurdish Institute

Chibli Mallat
Visiting Professor, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

Over a period of two decades, Chibli Mallat has had consistent record of intervention and reflection on issues of human rights, crimes against humanity, the democratic process, and the rule of law, in Lebanon and in the region, engaging the international judicial, political, and media arena to effect creative and pragmatic solutions.
Mallat is a lawyer at the Beirut bar and holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European Law at St Joseph’s University in Lebanon. Mallat has been involved in a number of international business and criminal cases, including the world famous case against Ariel Sharon in the Belgian courts. Prior to that, Mallat also taught for a decade at the University of London (SOAS), where he held the tenured Lectureship in Islamic Law and was the Director of the Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Laws. He has appeared on several TV and radio shows worldwide and has published a number of books and articles.

Ann Elizabeth Mayer
Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Professor Mayer earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan and obtained a Certificate in Islamic and Comparative Law from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and a J.D. from Penn Law. Her research areas include Islamic law in contemporary Middle Eastern and North African countries; problems of constitutionalism and the rule of law; and international human rights law. Much of her work has critically examined claims that international human rights law must be adjusted in the interests of satisfying the competing claims of local particularisms and religious law, with particular attention to issues of women’s rights. She has published extensively in scholarly journals and edited collections, and the fourth edition of her book Islam and Human Rights appeared in 2006. She has also taught at Georgetown, Princeton, and Yale.

Brendan O’Leary
Lauder Professor of Political Science and Director, Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict and Lauder Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

Professor O’Leary’s is a leading expert on issues of nationalism, national and ethnic conflict regulation, and power-sharing systems. He directs the Solomon Asch Center for Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor O’Leary served as constitutional advisor to the Kurdistan Regional Government in the process of drafting both the Kurdistan and Iraqi constitutions. Professor O’Leary’s recent publications include The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Engagements (with John McGarry) and The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq (with John McGarry and Khaled Salih).

Barnett D. Rubin
Director of Studies and Senior Fellow, Center on International Cooperation, New York University

Barnett Rubin is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on Afghanistan and the surrounding region, as well as on conflict prevention and peace building. Dr. Rubin was Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Central Asia at Columbia University from 1990 to 1996. In November-December 2001 he served as special advisor to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, during the negotiations that produced the Bonn Agreement. During 1994-2000 he was Director of the Center for Preventive Action, and Director, Peace and Conflict Studies, at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is currently deputy chair of the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum, a member the Steering Committee of Human Rights Watch/ Europe and Central Asia, the Executive Board of Human Rights Watch/Asia, the Board of the Open Society Institute’s Central Eurasia Project, the Conseil Scientifique of the Fondation Médecins Sans Frontières, and the Board of the International League for Human Rights.

Ambassador Dennis Ross
Director, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Special Middle East Coordinator, 1988-2000

For more than 12 years, Ambassador Dennis B. Ross played the leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process and in dealing directly with the negotiations. A highly skilled diplomat, he was this country’s point man in both the Bush and Clinton administrations for exploring all avenues and approaches to settling this age-old conflict. As the architect of the peace process, he was instrumental in assisting the Israelis and Palestinians in reaching the 1995 Interim Agreement, and he successfully brokered the Hebron Accord in 1997. He facilitated the Israeli-Jordan peace treaty and intensively worked to bring Israel and Syria together. Mr. Ross has been credited for managing the peace process through periods of crisis and stalemate. His “tireless” approach centered on making progress wherever it was possible, building new baselines of understanding, and refusing to accept that failure was an option.

Currently, Ambassador Ross is Counselor and Ziegler distinguished fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is the first chairman of a new Jerusalem-based think tank, the Institute for Jewish People Policy Planning, funded and founded by the Jewish Agency.

Kim Lane Scheppele
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; Director, Program in Law and Public Affairs, Princeton University; Associated Faculty, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Rogers Smith
Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

Rogers M. Smith teaches American constitutional law and American political thought, with special interests in issues of citizenship and racial, gender, and class inequalities, as well as constitutional issues of federalism and membership. He has published five books and over 100 essays in academic journals, edited volumes and public interest publications, including the American Political Science Review, the Western Political Quarterly, Studies in American Political Development, Daedalus, Social Research, Yale Law Journal, the American Prospect, the Nation, and others. His book Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Memberships (Cambridge University Press, 2003) explores the politics of crafting shared senses of political community amid religious, ethnic and regional differences.

Karol Soltan
Associate Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland and Deputy Director of Political and Constitutional Affairs, UNTAET, East Timor

Karol Soltan teaches in the Department of Government and Politics and in the Committee for Politics, Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland. His main interest is in issues connecting constitutionalism and development broadly conceived. His research has ranged from theoretical accounts of power and legitimacy and reformulations of the notion of constitutionalism to practical questions about policy and reform interventions to promote long term development in fragile states. Among his recent publications is a series of books he co-edited and contributed to, including A New Constitutionalism, The Constitution of Good Societies, Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, Institutions and Social Order and Politics from Anarchy to Democracy.
In 2000 he served as Deputy Director and Acting Director of the Office of Political, Constitutional and Electoral Affairs of the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor, and for two months he was also Acting Cabinet Member for Political Affairs in the Transitional Government of East Timor. During the summer of 2005 he served as advisor to the Kurdistan government in the negotiations on the Iraqi constitution.

H.E. Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie
Ambassador of Iraq to the United States of America

Samir is the Iraqi ambassador to the United States. He was born in Baghdad and left Iraq to study electrical
engineering at Durham University in the United Kingdom in 1973. He returned to Iraq in 1977 but left again for the UK in 1979 after Saddam Hussein seized power. He was appointed as Iraq’s ambassador to the United States in May 2006, after previously serving as the Iraq’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations (from July 2004), and prior to that, as Baghdad’s Interior Minister. Following the invasion of Iraq he was appointed a member of the Iraqi Governing Council.