Elizabeth Andersen

Elizabeth (Betsy) Andersen is Executive Director and Executive Vice President of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), a position she has held since 2006.  Previously she served as the Executive Director of the American Bar Association's Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (ABA CEELI), and as Executive Director of Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia Division.  Earlier in her career, she served as Legal Assistant to Judge Georges Abi-Saab of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and as a law clerk to Judge Kimba M. Wood of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.

Ms. Andersen is a graduate of Yale Law School, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and Williams College, from which she received the College’s Bicentennial Medal in 2006.  Her area of expertise is international humanitarian, human rights, and refugee law.  She serves as co-editor of the ASIL Studies in Transnational Legal Theory Series; as a member of the governing boards of the Washington Foreign Law Society and Friends of the Law Library of Congress; and as a member of the advisory committees of the American University Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, the International Senior Lawyers Project, and the Journal of International Humanitarian Legal Studies.