Alison Dundes Renteln is a Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Southern California where she teaches Law and Public Policy with an emphasis on international law and human rights.  A graduate of Harvard (History and Literature), she has a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from the USC Law School.   She served as Director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics and as Vice-Chair of the Department of Political Science.  In 2005 she received the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching (campus-wide).  Her publications include The Cultural Defense (Oxford), which received the 2006 USC Phi Kappa Phi Award for Creativity in Research.  Her book co-edited with Marie-Claire Foblets, Multicultural Jurisprudence:  Comparative Perspectives on the Cultural Defense was published in 2009 (Hart) and featured in the California Bar Journal (February issue).  Another collection, Cultural Diversity and Law:  State Responses from Around the World, co-edited with Marie-Claire Foblets and Jean-Francois Gaudreault-Desbiens, was published in 2010 (Bruylant).  Cultural Law:  International, National, and Indigenous, co-authored with James Nafziger and Robert Paterson, was also published 2010 (Cambridge).  Two of her essays appeared in a special issue of Judicature on cross-cultural jurisprudence (March-April 2009) and another on this topic in The Judges' Journal of the American Bar Association (Spring, 2010).  Her current project is a study of the jurisprudence of names. 

Professor Renteln has collaborated with the United Nations on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.  She lectured on comparative legal ethics in Bangkok and Manila at ABA-sponsored conferences.  She has often taught seminars on the rights of ethnic minorities for judges, lawyers, court interpreters, jury consultants, and police officers. During the past few years she participated on panels on cross-cultural justice at the meetings of the American Bar Association, the National Association of Women Judges, the North American South Asian Bar Association, the American Society of Trial Consultants, and others.  She served on several California civil rights commissions and the California committee of Human Rights Watch.  She is a member of the American Political Science Association, the American Society of International Law, the Law and Society Association, and the Commission on Legal Pluralism.

John Tasioulas joined the University of College London in January 2011 as the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence. He was previously a Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has also taught at the universities of Melbourne and Glasgow and has held visiting research posts at Melbourne and the Australian National University. His research grants include two Research Leave Awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2001 and 2004) and a British Academy Research Development Award (2008-2010) for a monograph-length project on the philosophy of human rights. He is currently a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and serves on the editorial boards of the American Society of International Law Studies in International Legal Theory and the Journal of Applied Philosophy. He is the author of numerous published articles on the legal and moral philosophy of international law and is co-editor of The Philosophy of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Professor Tasioulas' research interests revolve around Socrates' question, 'How should one live?', and the attempt to draw out the moral, political and legal implications of an acceptable answer to it. One strand of this inquiry focuses on the philosophy of human rights. Professor Tasioulas is currently engaged in writing a monograph that develops a pluralistic, interest-based account of human rights, one that - among other things - seeks to provide us with the intellectual resources to respond to the familiar objection that human rights reflect merely Western values.

Professor Tasioulas also has on-going research interests in a number of other topics, including the nature of moral wrong-doing and the responses appropriate to it, the components of human well-being, the plurality of ethical values, as well as meta-ethical questions about the reality of moral values and the possibility of moral knowledge.

After graduation from Harvard College in 1984, Cavallaro spent several years working with Central American refugees on the U.S.-Mexico border and with rights groups in Chile challenging abuses by the Pinochet government. He studied at Boalt Hall (University of California at Berkeley School of Law), where he served on the California Law Review and was graduated with Order of the Coif Honors. Cavallaro clerked for the Hon. Dolores K. Sloviter, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (1993-1994). In 1994, he opened a joint office for Human Rights Watch and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) in Rio de Janeiro, and served as director of the office, overseeing research, reporting and litigation against Brazil before the Inter-American system's human rights bodies. In 1999, he founded the Global Justice Center, now a leading Brazilian human Rights NGO, which he directed until arriving at HLS in 2002.

Professor Cavallaro's research interests include Human Rights Practice, Civil Society and Social Movements.