Faculty & Staff

International Law Activities

Oregon Law's faculty members participate in a wide range of scholarly activities, including energetic involvement in international law. The international work of the law school's faculty includes participation in research, presentations, conventions, processes, and publications. Oregon Law is proud to boast the numerous faculty members who take an active role in shaping our world.

Adell Amos

Carl Bjerre

Adell Amos, Assistant Professor of Law, Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program (on leave)
Professor Amos, whose area of expertise is concentrated on Water Resources Law, presented her work, "Policy Agenda Connecting Energy, Climate and Water: Working Within the Prior Appropriation System" to the International Municipal Lawyers Association Annual Meeting in 2008.

Carl Bjerre, Orlando J. and Marian H. Hollis Professor
Professor Bjerre specializes in commercial law, with particular emphasis on secured transactions, sales of receivables, and transactions in investment securities. He is a member of a Unites States delegation to UNIDROIT, also known as the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law, which is negotiating a multi-national Convention on Substantive Rules Regarding Intermediated Securities. Professor Bjerre also is the co-author (with Sandra Rocks) of "A Transactional Approach to the Hague Securities Convention," which appeared in the Capital Markets Law Journal in 2008.

John Bonine, Dean's Distinguished Faculty Fellow
Professor Bonine specializes in environmental and public interest law. He is a member of the Commission on Environmental Law of the World Conservation Union and an elected member of the International Council of Environmental Lawyers.

In recent years, Professor Bonine's work has included co-founding the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide ("ELAW"), a network of three-hundred environmental lawyers in seventy countries; participating as a citizen negotiator on international environmental treaties and conventions in Geneva and London for the European ECO Forum; chairing the Board of Directors for the Ukrainian public interest environmental law firm Environment-People-Law; and serving as an active member of the IUCN Commission on Environmental Law.

Ibrahim Gassama, Professor of Law
Professor Gassama's work focuses on issues surrounding human rights, foreign policy, and international economic development. These issues led him to recruit and train observers of elections in Haiti and South Africa, including South Africa's first all-race democratic election. In some cases, he served as an observer himself. Afterward, he supervised reports from the governmental agencies involved in the elections.

From 1985 to 1990, Professor Gassama worked on human rights, foreign policy, and international economic development issues for TransAfrica, the African-American lobby for Africa and the Caribbean. In 1994, he coordinated the recruitment, training, and deployment of U.S. based nongovernmental observers participating in South Africa's first all-race democratic election. Professor Gassama supervised the preparation of reports on the work of the South African Independent Electoral Commission and participated in two election-observer delegations composed of American and African lawyers.

Richard Hildreth, Dean's Distinguished Faculty Fellow
Professor Hildreth is the author of three casebooks and many other publications on ocean and coastal law. He has consulted frequently with federal and state coastal management agencies in the U.S. and Australia and with Pacific Island governments on environmental legal matters. Professor Hildreth served as the University of Queensland Law Faculty's 50th Anniversary Visiting Fellow. He teaches International Environmental Law.

Svitlana Kravchenko, LL.M. Program Director
Professor Kravchenko taught environmental law for twenty-five years at Lviv National University in Ukraine. During that time she also served as advisor for the Ministry of Environment and the Parliament of Ukraine. She is the founder and president of Environment-People-Law, the first public interest environmental law firm in Ukraine. She also is co-founder and co-director of the Association of Environmental Law of Central and Eastern Europe.

Professor Kravchenko served as a vice chair of the IUCN Commission of Environmental Law. She worked as a "citizen diplomat" in the international negotiation of the Aarhus Public Participation Convention, and she currently serves as elected member and vice chair of its Compliance Committee. Professor Kravchenko is an elected Regional Governor of International Council of Environmental Law (ICEL).

Michelle McKinley, Assistant Professor of Law
Professor McKinley teaches Law, Culture & Society; Immigration Law; Public International Law; and Refugee & Asylum Law. Professor McKinley has published extensively on international law, human rights, reproductive rights, and immigration issues. Currently, she is engaged in groundbreaking research on race, gender and cultural citizenship as a Wayne Morse Resident Scholar during the 2008-09 academic year. Her project, Bringing in Outsiders: Cultural Citizenship in Refugee and Asylum Law, critically examines a new generation of refugee litigation focused on gender and culture, using the legal ambivalence of the refugee to explore critical aspects of the debate on citizenship.

Professor McKinley is the former managing director of Cultural Survival, an advocacy and research organization dedicated to indigenous peoples. She also is the founder, and former director, of the Amazonian Peoples' Resources Initiative, a community based reproductive rights organization in Peru, where she worked for nine years as an advocate for global health and human rights.

Ofer Raban, Assistant Professor of Law
Professor Raban, who specializes in constitutional law and legal theory, is active in international circles. He taught legal theory at the University of Oxford, England, and published, among other places, in England, Germany, India, Australia, and Turkey. He also is a regular speaker at international conferences. Recent international engagements include presentations to the Ankara Bar Association and at the World Congress of the Philosophy of Law in Beijing. Professor Raban is the author of a chapter in a forthcoming book on legal philosophy at the age of globalization, slated to be published in Poland and China.

Merle Weiner, Philip H. Knight Professor of Law
Professor Weiner is an expert in family law in the United States and abroad. She recently finished an article on international family law for the Family Law Quarterly's fiftieth anniversary issue and an article on the U.S.'s performance at an international meeting on child abduction. Professor Weiner currently is preparing the second edition of the casebook Family Law in the World Community, and she is writing a book titled The Status of Parent-Partner.

In November 2008, Professor Weiner traveled to Qatar to participate in a colloquium focusing on the impact of violence against women on the family, sponsored by the Doha International Institute for Family Studies and Development.

Professor Weiner has trained judges on international child abduction for the National Conference of Juvenile and Family State Court Judges, has served as an expert witness in cases involving international child abduction, and has served as an observer for the drafting of the Uniform Child Abduction Prevention Act. She attended the Special Session to Review the Operation of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction in 2007 as a delegate of the International Society of Family Law.

Mary Wood, Philip H. Knight Professor of Law, Faculty Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program
Professor Wood is the founding director of the law school's Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program. She is a frequent speaker on global warming issues and has received national and international attention for her sovereign trust approach to global climate policy.

In 2008, Professor Wood published "A Framework of China-U.S. Partnership to Address Global Warming" in 3 China Environmental and Resource Law Review.