Mark Weston Janis

William F. Starr Professor of Law

Education/Professional Certification

JD, Harvard Law School
BA, MA Oxford University
AB, Princeton University

Expertise

International Law, Foreign Law, Constitutional Law, Human Rights Law, and Conflict of Laws

Biography

International law scholar Mark Weston Janis has been teaching at the UConn School of Law since 1980, when he joined the Academy after practicing corporate and financial law with Sullivan & Cromwell in New York and Paris. A graduate of Princeton University, Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and Harvard Law School, Professor Janis was a Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford, and a Reader in Law at the University of Oxford from 1993 to 1997.  He has since been a Visiting Fellow on the Oxford Law Faculty. He has held visiting appointments during his 40-plus years teaching international law, including at Cornell, UCLA, Paris, Strasbourg, Aix-Marseilles, Tilburg, Heidelberg, Mannheim, and Münster; at the Riga Graduate School of Law as a Fulbright Scholar; and at the Beijing University of Law and Economics. In recent years, he has taught International Law, European Human Rights Law, Conflict of Laws, and U.S. Law and Legal Institutions, a course designed for the Law School’s international LLM and exchange students.

A prolific writer, Professor Janis is the author or co-author of four widely used books –International Law, International Law Cases and Commentary, European Human Rights Law, and Religion and International Law – as well as two books on America’s tradition and historical role in the development of international law, and more than 90 articles on private and public international law. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Elements of International Law series for Oxford University Press. When not teaching, writing and editing, Professor Janis, a former officer in the United States Navy, has served on the boards and committees of several organizations that promote international law, including the American Bar Association, the American Society of International Law, the American Association of Law Schools, and the International Law Association. He has served as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1990 and as a member of the American Law Institute since 2013. He also serves on the editorial boards of several peer-reviewed law journals, including the Netherlands International Law Review, the International Community Law Review, and the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion.