USALI Faculty Director José E. Alvarez photographed during the induction ceremony on September 10, 2022.
USALI Faculty Director José E. Alvarez was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the oldest and most prestigious learned societies in the United States, on September 10, 2022. Professor Alvarez was elected in April 2021, but the ceremony was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He is among 252 new members announced on April 22, 2021, and one of only five law professors who were chosen. Other notable elected members in the class of 2021 include Oprah Winfrey, former attorney general Eric Holder, federal judges, and law school deans.
Professor Alvarez is the Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law at New York University School of Law, where he teaches and researches international law, foreign investment, and international organizations. He is a former president of the American Society of International Law, the previous co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law, and a member of the Institut de Droit International and Council on Foreign Relations.
The American Academy was founded in 1780, during the American Revolution, by John Adams, John Hancock, and 60 other scholar-patriots in order to gather knowledge and advance learning in service to the public good. Its elected members are world leaders in the arts and sciences, business, philanthropy, and public affairs. USALI’s co-founder and faculty director emeritus, Jerome A. Cohen, has been a member of the Academy since 1969.
In his acceptance letter to the Academy, Professor Alvarez wrote: “The wholly unexpected honor of joining a group whose esteemed members include my personal hero, Alexander Hamilton, is humbling and thrilling. Shortly after coming into New York harbor as a six-year immigrant I learned English from a picture book explaining Hamilton's role in the founding. Long before his life became a Broadway musical, I took comfort in seeing how this nation welcomed another immigrant from the Caribbean.”
“Hamilton's pride in his election to a Society that, despite its fledgling status in 1791, he held in ‘high and respectful opinion,’ is evident in his letter of acceptance. I suspect that for him, as for me, it represents a form of acceptance into a nation -- and not only into a group of fellow scholars.”
Before entering academia on a full-time basis in 1989, Alvarez was an attorney adviser with the Office of the Legal Adviser of the US Department of State where he worked on cases before the Iran-US Claims Tribunal, served on the negotiation teams for bilateral investment treaties, and the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, and was the legal adviser to the administration of justice program in Latin America coordinated by the Agency of International Development. Educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and Oxford University, Alvarez has also been in private practice and was a judicial clerk to the late Hon. Thomas Gibbs Gee of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. He has taught in NYU’s Singapore program at the National University of Singapore and serves on the Advisory Panel of Centre for International Law located at NUS.
His over 140 articles and book chapters and six books have made substantial scholarly contributions to a wide range of subjects within international law, including the law-generating rules of international organizations, the challenges facing international criminal tribunals, the boundaries between “public” and private,” and the legitimacy issues surrounding the international investment regime.