John G. Ruggie is the Berthold Beitz Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government and an Affiliated Professor in International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. Trained as a political scientist, Dr. Ruggie has made significant intellectual contributions to the study of international relations, focusing on the impact of economic and other forms of globalization on global rule making. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a recent survey published in Foreign Policy magazine identified him as one of the 25 most influential international relations scholars in the United States and Canada. He has won awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association.

Apart from his academic pursuits, Dr. Ruggie has long been involved in practical policy work, initially as a consultant to various agencies of the United Nations and the United States government. From 1997-2001, he served as United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Planning a post created specifically for him by then Secretary-General Kofi Annan. His areas of responsibility included establishing and overseeing the UN Global Compact, now the world’s largest corporate citizenship initiative; proposing and gaining General Assembly approval for the Millennium Development Goals; advising the Secretary-General on relations with Washington; and broadly contributing to the effort at institutional renewal for which the Secretary-General and the United Nations as a whole were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001.

In 2005, responding to a request by the UN Commission on Human Rights (now Human Rights Council), Annan appointed Dr. Ruggie as the Secretary-Generals Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, a post he continues to hold in the new UN administration of Ban Ki-Moon. In that capacity, his job is to propose measures to strengthen the human rights performance of the business sector around the world.

Dr. John M. Kline is a Professor of International Business Diplomacy in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He is a past Director of the Master of Science in Foreign Service Program and the Karl F. Landegger Program in International Business Diplomacy. His teaching focuses on international business-government relations, international investment strategies and negotiations, and international business ethics.

Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, Dr. Kline was Director of International Economic Policy at the National Association of Manufacturers. He received his doctorate in political science from The George Washington University and holds a masters degree in international relations from The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Dr. Kline serves as a consultant to various international organizations and private multinational corporations. He has conducted studies for the United Nations, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the U.S. Advisory Committee on Intergovernmental Relations. His current projects include a comparative analysis for UNCTAD on foreign investment policy promoting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia and Singapore, and a faculty workshop at Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in Mexico on teaching business ethics.

Susan Farbstein is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and the Clinical Litigation Fellow at HRP. Her work focuses on litigation under the Alien Tort Statute and on issues related to transitional justice, particularly in Southern Africa. Through the Clinic, she is co-counsel on In re South African Apartheid Litigation, a suit against multinational corporations for aiding and abetting human rights violations in South Africa, and Mamani v. Sanchez-Berzain, which brings claims against the former president and defense minister of Bolivia related to a 2003 massacre of civilians. She also assisted in litigating Wiwa v. Shell, which charged Shell with complicity in the torture and killing of non-violent Nigerian activists in the mid-1990s, and which settled for $15.5 million in 2009. Additionally, she has drafted amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court in Samantar v. Yousuf and to the Second Circuit in Presbyterian Church of Sudan v. Talisman. Her most recent publication is Prosecuting Apartheid-Era Crimes? A South African Dialogue on Justice (with Tyler Giannini). Before joining HRP, Farbstein worked at the Cape Town office of the International Center for Transitional Justice, where her position was funded by a Harvard Kaufman Fellowship and Princeton-in-Africa. Prior to her time at ICTJ, she clerked for the Honorable Morris E. Lasker of the Southern District of New York. She previously held internships with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the ICTJ’s New York office, and has provided research assistance to the Special Court for Sierra Leone and Human Rights First. While in law school, she served as Executive Editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal and as a teaching assistant to Professor Laurence Tribe. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.Phil. in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. from Princeton University.

Tyler Giannini is the Clinical Director of the Human Rights Program and a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. Prior to coming to HLS in 2004, Tyler was co-director of EarthRights International (ERI), an organization at the forefront of efforts to link human rights and environmental protection. As a founder of ERI, Giannini spent a decade in Thailand conducting investigative fact-finding efforts on human rights abuses in Burma and groundbreaking corporate accountability litigation. In particular, Giannini was co-counsel in the landmark Doe v. Unocal litigation. The case sought to hold the corporation accountable for abuses surrounding the Yadana gas pipeline project in Burma, and was settled in early 2005. Giannini holds graduate degrees in law and foreign policy from the University of Virginia, where he was a member of the law review.

Charles Abrahams is the Senior Partner responsible for the litigation, commercial, constitutional and administrative law, international law and competition law departments of the firm Abrahams Kiewitz Attorneys in South Africa. He has worked for plaintiffs on cases including: Anglo Platinum (displacement in South Africa); AngloGold Ashanti (silicosis in South Africa); Gencor (asbestosis in South Africa); various companies (re apartheid in South Africa).

Chris Jochnick is the Director of the Private Sector Department at Oxfam America and Coordinator of the Private Sector Team of Oxfam International. Mr. Jochnick is the co-founder of the Center for Economic and Social Rights (NY) and the Centro de Derechos Economicos y Sociales (Ecuador). He has worked for over fifteen years on issues of human rights and corporate accountability, including seven years in Latin America supporting grassroots campaigns around trade, health and extractive industries. He has participated in a number of multi-stakeholder initiatives and sits on the Steering Committee of the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights and on the International Advisory Panel of JO-IN. Prior to joining Oxfam, Mr. Jochnick worked as a corporate attorney with the Wall Street law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, where he advised companies on environment and social liabilities. Mr. Jochnick is a graduate of Harvard Law School, a former MacArthur Research and Writing fellow and Echoing Green fellow. He recently co-edited the book Sovereign Debt at the Crossroads (Oxford, 2007) and has lectured widely on issues of human rights, business and development, including a course on business and human rights at Harvard Law School.

Dr. Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky is currently a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Global Law and the Program Director for the LL.M in Global Administrative Law at the University of Rio Negro, in Argentina. He also works as a legal consultant for ECLAC-UN on BITs and water.

He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Salamanca (2007) and a European Doctorate after conducting his doctoral research at the Economic Department of the University of Vienna (2004-5). He holds a Bachelor in Law (National University of Comahue, Patagonia, 1999) and an LL.M. in Corporate law from Austral University (Buenos Aires, 2002). From 2008-09 he was a Hauser Global Fellow at New York University School of Law. He has also defended the Argentine state in the International Chamber of Commerce; has been a consultant of the Federal Planning minister and Defense minister of Argentina; and was the founder and managing director of the national water supply company in Argentina.

Veerle Opgenhaffen is the Senior Program Director at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), where she oversees the Center’s operations as well as works on a wide range of projects, including the right to food and water in Haiti; the human rights impacts of anti-radicalization policies in Europe and North Africa; and accountability for U.S. counter-terrorism policies globally—in particular, seeking avenues for justice and redress for victims of the U.S. detention, extraordinary rendition, and coerced interrogation program.

Prior to joining CHRGJ in 2007, she spent several years at the New York office of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), both in the Middle East and North Africa Unit and in the Communications Department.

She holds a B.A. in International Affairs from Antioch College and an M.A. in International Affairs from the New School University, where she concentrated on global justice and human rights. Her Master’s Thesis, The Force of Memory against Forgetting: Justice, Impunity, and Reconciliation in the Context of Algeria’s Blanket Amnesty, drew on international law and transitional justice principles to challenge the legality and likely impacts of Algeria’s 2006 amnesty law.

Her recent scholarship includes, “Transitional Justice in Morocco: Lifting the Veil on a Forgotten Face” (co-authored with Mark Freeman and published in Reconciliation(s), McGill-Queens University Press, May 2009) and “The Past and Present of Corporate Complicity: Financing the Argentinean Dictatorship” (co-authored with Dr. Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky) in the Harvard Human Rights Journal, Volume 23 (forthcoming). She has also collaborated on numerous publications on behalf of the CHRGJ.

Dr. Terri Marsh received her Ph.D. in Classics from SUNY at Buffalo in 1979, and taught at the university level for over a decade, focusing on Greek political theory and philosophy, Socrates, and women’s studies. Based on her reading of the Greek historian / political theorist Thucydides and a lifelong concern for human and civil rights issues, she then made a career change – graduating from the New York University School of Law in 1992 and proceeding to work as a consultant for the Clinton/Gore presidential campaign of that year, then for the Center for Law and Social Policy and for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund.

From 1994 to 2004, she practiced as a juvenile and criminal defense attorney for the D.C. Superior Court, and then in 2005 launched the Human Rights Law Foundation, an NGO that works to hold high-ranking officials and multinational corporations accountable for human rights abuses in Asia. In her capacity as Executive Director and Senior Litigation Partner for HRLF, Dr. Marsh has acted as a pro bono attorney for members of persecuted groups in China and is currently initiating a “Justice for Women Program” to provide legal services to and coordinate litigation on behalf of women subjected to sex crimes and violence in Asia and the United States. She has been published on academic topics ranging from classical literature to gender theory and the rule of law in China, and is currently working on a book entitled “The Politics of Persecution: The Chinese Communist Party’s Crimes against Falun Gong.”

Dr. Rajendra S. Sisodia is Professor of Marketing at Bentley University, and was previously Trustee Professor of Marketing and the Founding Director of the Center for Marketing Technology. A leading figure in the Conscious Capitalism movement, he is also the Founder and Chairman of the Conscious Capitalism Institute (www.cc-institute.com). An electrical engineer from BITS, Pilani (India), Dr. Sisodia has an MBA in Marketing from the Bajaj Institute of Management Studies in Bombay, and a Ph. D. in Marketing & Business Policy from Columbia University, where he was the Booz Allen Hamilton Fellow.

His research, teaching and consulting expertise spans the areas of conscious capitalism, corporate strategy and leadership, globalization, stakeholder management, marketing strategy, marketing ethics, relationship marketing, and measuring and improving marketing productivity. In 2003, Dr. Sisodia was cited as one of “50 Leading Marketing Thinkers” and named to the “Guru Gallery” by the UK-based Chartered Institute of Marketing. In 2007, he was honored with the Award for Excellence in Scholarship by Bentley University. In 2008, he received the Bentley University Innovation in Teaching Award.

Dr. Sisodia’s book Firms of Endearment: How World Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose has been translated into six languages and was named one of the best business books of 2007 by several organizations, including Amazon.com. His book The Rule of Three: How Competition Shapes Markets has been translated into German, Italian, Polish, Japanese and Chinese. It was the subject of a seven part television series by CNBC Asia, and was a finalist for the 2004 Best Marketing Book Award from the American Marketing Association. Other books include Tectonic Shift: The Geoeconomic Realignment of Globalizing Markets and Does Marketing Need Reform? Forthcoming books include The 4As of Marketing and A Roadmap for Conscious Capitalism. Dr. Sisodia has also published over one hundred articles in publications such as Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of Business Strategy, and many others. A frequent and popular keynote speaker, Dr. Sisodia has made nearly 300 presentations at leading universities, corporations, non-profits and other organizations around the world.