Tom Farer is University Professor at the University of Denver, a position he assumed after serving for fourteen years (1996-2010) as Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He previously served as President of the University of New Mexico, of the Inter- American Commission on Human Rights, and of the Association of Professional School of International Studies (APSIA). He has been a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment and The Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C. He has worked in the Department of State as special assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs and in the Department of Defense as special assistant to the General Counsel. He has consulted for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other human rights organizations. At the United Nations he served as legal advisor to the UN operation in Somalia (1993) where decades earlier he had served as law and karate instructor to the National Police force. He is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of International Law and the Human Rights Quarterly and was co-editor of the journal Global Governance. He is on the editorial advisory boards of The International Spectator, Global Governance, and the Chinese Journal of International Law.
He has taught law at Columbia, Rutgers, Tulane, Harvard, Nanterre (Sorbonne), and American University and international relations at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, American University’s School of International Service, IBEI (Barcelona), and Cambridge University. He has lectured widely in Africa, Latin America, China, Japan, South Korea and Europe and been an “Honorary Professor” at Peking University. He has published twelve books and monographs and his many articles have appeared in such journals as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, World Politics, International Organization, the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews, The International Spectator, and the Human Rights Quarterly. His most recent book is Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism: The Framework of a Liberal Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press 2008).
He is married to the former Mika Ignatieff and has two children and two grandchildren. He is a graduate of Princeton University (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna cum Laude) and the Harvard Law School (Magna cum Laude) where he served as notes editor of the Harvard Law Review. He was the last clerk chosen to serve Judge Learned Hand.