Beth Van Schaack

Beth Van Schaack is the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School where she teaches in the areas of international human rights, international criminal law, and human trafficking, among other subjects, and has been the Acting Director of the Human Rights & Conflict Resolution Clinic. She is also a Faculty Fellow with Stanford’s Center for Human Rights & International Justice.

Prior to returning to academia, she served as Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice of the U.S. Department of State under Secretaries Clinton and Kerry. In that capacity, she helped to advise the Secretary of State and the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights on the formulation of U.S. policy regarding the prevention of and accountability for mass atrocities, such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. She has also spent time in private practice with Morrison & Foerster LLP and with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

She advises a number of human rights and international justice organizations, including: the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), the International Institute for Criminal Investigations (IICI), the National Institute of Military Justice (NIMJ), the International Justice Resource Center (IJRC), the Commission on International Justice & Accountability (CIJA), the Center for Justice & Accountability, Nuru International, and Accountability Council.

Van Schaack is a graduate of Stanford University (B.A.); Yale Law School (J.D.); and University of Leiden School of Law (PhD). Her dissertation, entitled Imagining Justice for Syria, has been published by Oxford University Press.