2007 International Environmental Law Award Recipient – Edith Brown Weiss
The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) is pleased to award the annual CIEL International Environmental Law Award to Professor Edith Brown Weiss from the Georgetown University Law Center. Professor Edith Brown Weiss is honored for her many distinguished contributions to the development and implementation of international environmental law. This award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the effort to achieve solutions to environmental problems through international law and institutions.
Professor Brown Weiss has produced germinal scholarship on both inter-generational equity and implementation of and compliance with multilateral environmental agreements, as well as on other aspects of international environmental law. She is an internationally renowned teacher of international environmental law as well as other international law topics; and she has served in international environmental and other legal posts in the U.S. government, advised inter-governmental organizations, and mentored many students.
About Professor Edith Brown Weiss
Ms. Brown Weiss is the Francis Cabell Brown Professor of International Law at Georgetown University Law Center, where she has been on the faculty since 1978. In 2002, she was appointed to a five-year term at the Inspection Panel of the World Bank, and served as the Chairperson of the Panel through 2007, an appointment at the Vice Presidential level. Before Georgetown, she was a professor of civil engineering and politics at Princeton University.
Ms. Brown Weiss served as President of the American Society of International Law from 1994 – 1996, and as Associate General Counsel for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she established the Division of International Environmental Law. She has also served in the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Ms. Brown Weiss has been a director for the Cousteau Society, the Center for International Environmental Law, Japanese Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Professor Brown Weiss has been a Special Legal Advisor to the North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation and has been a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Commission on Geosciences, Environment, and Resources, the Water Science and Technology Board, the Environmental Studies Board, and the Committee on Sustainable Water Supplies in the Middle East. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the new edition of the Encyclopedia of International Law, prepared by the Max Planck Institute in Germany. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Council on Environmental Law, and the IUCN Commission on Environmental Law, for which she is a member of the Steering Committee.
She has won many prizes for her work, including the Elizabeth Haub prize from the Free University of Brussels and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for international environmental law, the American Bar Association Award to an individual for distinguished achievements in Environmental Law and Policy, and the American Society of International Law’s Certificate of Merit given to the most outstanding piece of scholarship in international law in the previous year. Her book In Fairness to Future Generations, for which she won the ASIL award, has been published in English, French, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. She has also received other national and international awards for her books and articles.
Ms. Brown Weiss is an outstanding legal scholar who has taught and published widely on issues of international law and especially international environmental law. Ms. Brown Weiss received a Bachelor’s of Arts degree from Stanford University with Great Distinction, an LL.B. (J.D.) from Harvard Law School, a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley, and an Honorary Doctor of Laws from Chicago-Kent College of Law.
Ms. Brown Weiss joins an illustrious group of individuals who have received the award in the past. Louis B. Sohn (for whom Ms. Brown Weiss was a research assistant) received the inaugural CIEL International Environmental Law Award in 2003, followed by Alexandre Charles Kiss (France) in 2004, Drs. Francoise Burhenne-Guilmin (Belgium) and Wolfgang Burhenne (Austria) in 2005, and Ambassador Raul Estrada-Oyuela (Argentina) in 2006.