Alex Whiting, who currently serves as the prosecution coordinator in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, will rejoin the Harvard Law School faculty this July as a professor of practice. Whiting previously taught at HLS as an assistant clinical professor.
The professorships of practice at Harvard Law School are given to outstanding individuals whose teaching is informed by extensive expertise from the worlds of law practice, the judiciary, policy and governance.
“With the appointment of this remarkable prosecutor and scholar, we continue to strengthen the bridge between Harvard Law School and law-in-practice. Alex’s involvement in our community will offer our students and faculty a vitally important perspective on the quest for international justice and the enforcement of universal standards aimed at eradicating war crimes and other atrocities which all too sadly continue to occur in so many parts of the world,” said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow.
As the prosecution coordinator for the ICC, Whiting has been responsible for managing prosecutions of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. He has focused on ICC investigations in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Kenya, among other countries. Previously, he worked as the Investigation Coordinator at the ICC from 2010-2012.
From 2002 to 2007, Whiting worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), serving first as a trial attorney, then as senior trial attorney from 2005 to 2007. He successfully prosecuted a case against Serbian rebel leader Milan Martic, who was sentenced to 35 years in jail by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague for atrocities carried out in Croatia in the early 1990s.
Whiting also served domestically as an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts and as a trial attorney in the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. He holds a B.A. and a J.D. from Yale.
Whiting is the author of many works, including “International Criminal Law: Cases and Commentary,” co-written with Antonio Cassese, Guido Acquaviva, and Mary Fan (Oxford U. Press, 2011) and “The ICTY as a Laboratory of International Criminal Procedure,” published in “The Legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia” (Oxford U. Press, 2011).
He is an editorial board member of the Journal of International Criminal Justice, vice-president of the War Crimes Committee at the International Bar Association, faculty advisor of the Harvard International law Journal and he serves on the advisory board of the Harvard National Security Journal.