Ruth Wedgwood to Deliver 41st Annual Hanify-Howland Lecture at Holy Cross

Ruth Wedgwood, the Edward B. Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy, and Director of the Program in International Law and Organization at the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, D.C., will deliver the 41st annual Hanify-Howland Memorial Lecture on Nov. 30 at 8 p.m. in the Hogan Campus Center Ballroom at the College of the Holy Cross. The event, titled “Fighting Terrorism Within the Law,” is free and open to the public.

Wedgwood serves on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on International Law and the CIA’s Historical Review Panel. She also serves as the American member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Wedgwood has commented frequently on issues of terrorism and the law on National Public Radio, “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” and BBC, among other media outlets. She has testified before the Senate on issues of war crimes, Presidential war powers and trying Saddam Hussein.

At Johns Hopkins and at Yale, where she was previously professor of law, Wedgwood has taught courses and seminars on general public international law, the United Nations, global constitutionalism, international human rights, war crimes and terrorism, the law of armed conflict, constitutional foreign affairs power, international arbitration, and American legal history.

The annual Hanify-Howland lecture honors the late Edward F. Hanify, a 1904 graduate of Holy Cross and a Massachusetts Superior Court justice for 15 years, who died in 1954. The series was started by Hanify’s friend, the late Weston Howland of Milton, Mass., board chairman of Warwick Mills, Inc., who died in 1976.

Since 1965, the Hanify-Howland lecture series has brought to the Holy Cross campus a series of distinguished speakers on public affairs who have exemplified in their own work the spirit of public service that the series was established to encourage. They include Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity; Robert M. Hayes, founder of the National Coalition for the Homeless; Leon R. Kass, former Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics; Christopher J. Matthews (Holy Cross Class of 1967), MSNBC “Hardball” anchor; the Honorable Clarence Thomas (Class of 1971), associate justice of the Supreme Court; the late Paul E. Tsongas, former senator of Massachusetts; and Paul A. Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve System.