MORGANTOWN – Internationally known scholar and international criminal law and human rights practitioner Susan Lamb shared her expertise and unique experiences through the C. Edwin Baker Lecture for Liberty, Equality and Democracy at the West Virginia University College of Law on Jan. 30.
“Professor Lamb has worked for the United Nations for most of her career,” Anne Lofaso, Arthur B. Hodges professor of law at WVU College of Law, told The West Virginia Record. “It is very difficult to break into UN jobs. Professor Lamb is a wonderful contact for our students.”
Susan Lamb
In addition to delivering the lecture, Lofaso said Lamb was invited to a brown bag lunch to discuss her work with the UN, and she will help the school’s Jessup International Law Moot Court prepare for competition. Lofaso said Lamb was on the Jessup Team for Oxford University when she was a graduate student there.
Lofaso said the annual lecture was brought to the school in honor of her constitutional law professor and friend, C. Edwin Baker, who died in 2009 at the age of 62.
“The purpose of the lecture is to bring nationally and internationally known experts in human rights law, particularly in the fields which Professor Baker researched: Free speech, democracy, equality, liberty and other human rights,” Lofaso said.
She said the lecture’s purpose is to expose the students and faculty at WVU to areas of law and legal expertise to which they may not normally be otherwise exposed.
“This broadens the horizons of everyone in our community,” Lofaso said. “It also gives our students networking opportunities.”
Lamb said this is her first collaboration with WVU College of Law.
Lamb told The West Virginia Record that the topic of her lecture, “International Criminal Justice and Notions of Equality and Liberty” was designed “to develop understanding developing norms within the field of international accountability and to draw closer links between comparable doctrines in constitutional and international law.”
Lamb is an international criminal and humanitarian law practitioner with approximately 17 years of experience with various United Nations International Criminal Tribunals, including the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.
For the past two years, Lamb has worked on accountability efforts related to atrocity crimes committed in the course of the Syrian crisis.
Before beginning her United Nations career, Lamb completed doctoral studies in public international law at Balliol College, Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar. She is a graduate in law and politics from Otago University, New Zealand, and is admitted to practice law in New Zealand, her home country.
WVU said in a news release that Baker was the Nicholas F. Gallicchio Professor of Law and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
In 2011, Baker’s family donated his papers to the WVU College of Law. The C. Edwin Baker Collection “is a window into the life and work of one of the 20th century’s foremost experts on constitutional law, free speech and communication law,” the release said.