Michael Scharf

Michael Scharf is Professor of Law and Director of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. From October 2004-March 2005, Professor Scharf served as a member of the elite international team of experts which provided training to the judges and prosecutors of the Iraqi Special Tribunal. In February 2005, Professor Scharf and the Public International Law and Policy Group, a Non-Governmental Organization he co-founded, were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by six governments and the Prosecutor of an International Criminal Tribunal for the work they have done to help in the prosecution of major war criminals, such as Slobodan Milosevic, Charles Taylor, and Saddam Hussein.

During the first Bush and Clinton Administrations, Professor Scharf served in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State, where he held the positions of Counsel to the Counter-Terrorism Bureau, Attorney-Adviser for Law Enforcement and Intelligence, Attorney-Adviser for United Nations Affairs, and delegate to the United Nations General Assembly and to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. In 1993, he was awarded the State Department's Meritorious Honor Award "in recognition of superb performance and exemplary leadership" in relation to his role in the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

A graduate of Duke University School of Law, Professor Scharf is the author of over fifty scholarly articles and seven books, including Balkan Justice, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which was awarded the American Society of International Law's Certificate of Merit for the Outstanding book in International Law in 1999, Peace with Justice, which won the International Association of Penal Law Book of the Year Award for 2003, and casebooks on The Law of International Organizations and International Criminal Law.

Professor Scharf has testified as an expert before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee; his Op Eds have been published by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and International Herald Tribune; and he has appeared on ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Nightline with Ted Koppel, The O'Reilly Factor, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, The Charlie Rose Show, the BBC's The World, CNN, and National Public Radio.

In 2002, Professor Scharf established the War Crimes Research Office at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, which provides research assistance to the Prosecutors of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the International Criminal Court, and the Iraqi Special Tribunal on issues pending before those international tribunals. Copies of over seventy of these research memos are available on the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center War Crimes Research Portal, at: http://law.case.edu/war-crimes-research-portal.