Tom Farer is Dean of the Graduate School of International Studies of the University of Denver is the former President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States and of the University of New Mexico. Within the United States government, he has served as special assistant first to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense and then to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs.

He has published 11 books and monographs and over 100 articles and book chapters primarily concerning issues of international and comparative law, foreign policy, human rights and international institutions. His most recent book, Transnational Crime in the Americas, was published by Routledge in 1999. His articles have appeared in such journals as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York and London Review of Books, International Organization, World Politics and the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews.

Dean Farer has studied processes of economic and political development outside Europe and North American and has also been a participant. He has taught criminal law and procedure and unarmed self-defense to an African police force and assisted in Uganda’s Constitutional revision process in 1994-95. He has also studied the operations of international organizations and in 1993 served as legal consultant to the United Nations Operations in Somalia. In that capacity, he investigated the attacks on UN forces and submitted a report to the Security Council. In 1980, he participated in the successful resolution of the hostage crisis arising from the occupation of the Dominican Embassy in Bogota, Colombia by members of the M-19 guerilla organization.

Bio courtesy of the University of Denver website.

See the Conversations with History interview with Tom Farer: International Law and Human Rights (2000).

John Yoo received his B.A., summa cum laude, in American history from Harvard University. Between college and law school, he worked as a newspaper reporter in Washington, D.C. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal. He then clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the D.C. Circuit.

Professor Yoo joined the Boalt faculty in 1993, then clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995-96. From 2001 to 2003, he served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs, national security and the separation of powers.

He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and the Free University of Amsterdam. He has received research fellowships from the University of California, Berkeley, the Olin Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Professor Yoo also has received the Paul M. Bator Award for excellence in legal scholarship and teaching from the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy. He has testified before the judiciary committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and has advised the State of California on constitutional issues.

Professor Yoo has published articles about foreign affairs, international law and constitutional law in a number of the nation’s leading law journals, including the law reviews of Boalt Hall, Chicago, Columbia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas. He is the author of War, Peace, and the Constitution (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2005).

Bio and photo courtesy of the Boalt Hall School of Law website.

Mark Danner, staff writer for The New Yorker, is at work on an extended series of articles on the war in the former Yugoslavia. The articles - which began with Danner's cover piece, "The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe," in the New York Review of Books of November 20, 1997, and now (with "Kosovo: The Meaning of Victory," New York Review, July 15, 1999) number eleven - were recently recognized by the Overseas Press Club as the "Best Reporting From Abroad of 1998." Next year Pantheon will publish an adaptation of these pieces in a volume entitled, The Saddest Story: America, the Balkans and the Post-Cold War World.

Mark Danner joined The New Yorker's staff in April 1990, five months after the magazine published his three-part series on Haiti, "A Reporter At Large: Beyond the Mountains" -- and a few days after the articles were granted the 1990 National Magazine Award for Reporting. On December 6, 1993, for the second time in its history, The New Yorker devoted its entire issue to one article -- Danner's piece, "The Truth of El Mozote." That article, an investigation into the notorious massacre in a remote Salvadoran town, was granted an Overseas Press Club Award and a Latin American Studies Association award. Danner's book, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War, was published by Vintage in April, 1994 (and was recognized by The New York Times Book Review, as one of the "Notable Books of the Year"). Danner's study of Haiti, Beyond the Mountains: The Legacy of Duvalier, is forthcoming from Pantheon.

Bio courtesy of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism website.

See the Conversations with History interview with Mark Danner: Ideas and Leadership in U.S. Foreign Policy (1999).