Gregory H. Fox (an8360)

Gregory Fox is the director of the Program for International Legal Studies. Professor Fox is a widely cited authority on international law and international organizations and a leader in a variety of academic and professional organizations. He joined Wayne Law in 2002. Prior to joining the Wayne Law faculty, Fox was an assistant professor of law at Chapman Law School in Orange, California.

In the winter 2013 semester Professor Fox was a visiting professor at the Universidad IberoInteramicana in Mexico City. In the winter 2009 semester he was a visiting fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at Cambridge University. In 2015 he was a scholar-in-residence at the London offices of WilmerHale.

He began his legal career in the litigation department of Hale & Dorr (now WilmerHale) in Boston, where he worked on one of the early cases brought under the Alien Tort Statute, Forti v. Suarez-Mason. He held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and Public International Law in Heidelberg, Germany, and at the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School before beginning his teaching career. From 1992-95 he was the co-director of the Center for International Studies at New York University Law School. He also served as a law clerk to the Hon. Alan H. Nevas of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.

Fox is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation/Social Science Research Council Fellowship in International Peace and Security. That fellowship allowed him to write "The Right to Political Participation in International Law," 17 Yale J. Int'l L. 539 (1992), which is one of the 10 most cited articles ever published in the Yale Journal. During this period, Fox's scholarship focuses on how the world-wide spread of democracy has affected the international legal system. He is the editor (with Brad Roth) of Democratic Governance and International Law (Cambridge 2000), as well as a 20-year update of that volume (also edited with Professor Roth) to be published by Edlward Elgar in 2020.

Fox’s next phase of scholarship focused on the external governance of territories. Humanitarian Occupation reviews the U.N.'s experience in administering entire states or portions of states. In a number of critical articles, Fox examines the state of occupation law, arguing against efforts to endow occupying powers with virtually unlimited authority to transform the states they control.

One recent project is Supreme Law of the Land?: Debating the Contemporary Effects of Treaties within the United States Legal System (with Wayne Law colleagues Paul Dubinsky and Brad Roth) on the role of treaties in American law. The book was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.

Fox’s most recent projects have employed quantitative methods to assess the status of rules and institutions in international law. A 2018 article (with Kristen Boon and Isaac Jenkins) asks whether the UN Security Council has consistently supported new rules for parties to civil wars. Another asks if the Council has supported particular types of external intervention in civil wars. His most recent article will explore civil war peace agreements as previously unrecognized means of implementing and enforcing international norms.

Fox has been a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law and was the founding chairman of the Committee on International Human Rights of the State Bar of Michigan. In 2008 he became an expert consultant to the International Committee of the Red Cross for its project on the future of occupation law.

In addition to his academic work, Fox has served as counsel in several international cases. He was co-counsel to the state of Eritrea in the Zuqar-Hanish Islands arbitration with the Republic of Yemen; that determined the status of a group of islands in the southern Red Sea. He also represented a group of Eritreans in U.S. federal court who were forcibly deported from Ethiopia in 1998 and had their property confiscated by the Ethiopian government. And he was counsel in several Alien Tort Statute cases in addition to the Forti case.

Fox holds a bachelor’s in history with highest honors from Bates College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his law degree from New York University.

J.D., New York University Law School
B.A., Bates College 

Civil Procedure
Conflict of Laws
International Civil Litigation
International Law
United States Foreign Relations Law
Current Problems in International Law (seminar)
International Legal Research (seminar)

Democracy and International Law (editor with Brad R. Roth) (volume compiling the leading articles on the subject in the last decade with a comprehensive introduction) (Edward Elgar, forthcoming 2020)

State Consent within the Jus ad Bellum, 3 Max Planck Trialogues on the Law of Peace and War (Anne Peters & Christian Marxsen, eds., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2020) (one of three invited authors)

Vietnamese Invasion of Cambodia, Jus Contra Bellum Case Studies (Tom Ruys & Olivier Corten, eds) (Oxford University Press 2018)

The Dual Lives of ‘The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance, 112 AJIL Unbound 67 (2018) (with Brad R. Roth)

The Contributions United Nations Security Council Resolutions to the Law of Non-International Armed Conflict: New Evidence of Customary International Law, 67 Am. U. L. Rev. 649 (2018) (with Kristen E. Boon and Isaac Jenkins)

• Winner of the 2020 Scholarly Paper Award from the Canadian Council of International Law

Supreme Law of the Land? Debating the Contemporary Effects of Treaties within the United States Legal System, Cambridge University Press (2017) (with Paul Dubinsky & Brad Roth)

Intervention by Invitation, Oxford Handbook on the Use of Force (Oxford University Press 2014) (Marc Weller, ed)

The Case of Eritrea, in Self-Determination and Secession in International Law (Christian Walter, ed.) (Oxford University Press 2014)

Navigating the Unilateral-Multilateral Divide, in Jus Post Bellum: Mapping the Normative Foundations (Carsten Stahn, Jens Iverson & Jennifer Easterday, eds.) (Oxford University Press 2014)

Review of Eyal Benvenisti, The International Law of Occupation, 24 European Journal of International Law 453 (2013) (2d ed., Oxford University Press 2012)

Exit from Belligerent Occupation, in Exit Strategies and Peace Consolidation (Richard Caplan, ed.) (2012 Oxford University Press)

Transformative Occupation and the Unilateralist Impulse, 94 International Review of the Red Cross 237 (2012)

Entries on “An International Right to Democracy” and “Regime Change” in The Encyclopedia of Public International Law (Max Planck Institute 2009-12)

A Return to Trusteeship? A Comment on International Territorial Administration, in A Wiser Century? – Judicial Dispute Settlement, Disarmament and the Laws of War 100 Years after the Second Hague Peace Conference (Thomas Giegerich, ed.) (Duncker & Humblot 2009)

Humanitarian Occupation (Cambridge University Press 2008)

Internationalizing National Politics: Lessons for International Organizations, 13 Widener Law Review 265 (2007)

The Human Rights of Anti-Democratic Actors, 2 Annuaire International des Droits de l’Homme 365 (2007)

The Occupation of Iraq, 36 Georgetown Journal of International Law 195 (2005)

Book Review, Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law by Karen Knop, 98 American Journal of International Law 229 (2004)

International Law and the Entitlement to Democracy After War, 9 Global Governance 179 (2003)

The Security Council and Democratization, in The United Nations Security Council in the 21st Century (David Malone, ed.) (Lynne Rienner 2003)

Comment on Sovereign Equality, in United States Hegemony and the Foundations of International Law (Michael Byers & Georg Nolte eds.) (Cambridge University Press 2003)

Democracy and International Law, 27 Review of International Studies 327 (2001) (with Brad R. Roth)

Conflicts of International Law, 2001 Proceedings of the American Society of International Law 183

Election Monitoring: the International Legal Setting, 19 Wisconsin Journal of International Law 295 (2001).

Democratic Governance and International Law (with Brad R. Roth) (Cambridge University Press 2000)