Jens Meierhenrich is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and previously taught for a decade at Harvard University, where he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government. He is the author of The Legacies of Law: Long-Run Consequences of Legal Development in South Africa, 1652-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which won the American Political Science Association’s 2009 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book published in the United States during the previous year in politics, government, or international affairs.
His other books include The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law (Oxford University Press, 2018), Lawfare: A Genealogy (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and, as editor or co-editor, Genocide: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2014), The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Political Trials in Theory and History (Cambridge University Press, 2016). He also edited a special double issue of Law & Contemporary Problems on “The Practices of the International Criminal Court” and is presently at work on a genocide trilogy, comprising The Rationality of Genocide, The Structure of Genocide, and The Culture of Genocide (all to be published by Princeton University Press). Also in the works are The Violence of Law: The Formation and Deformation of Gacaca Courts in Rwanda, 1994-2012 (Cambridge University Press), Genocide: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press) as well as three edited collections: The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press), The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press), and The Law and Practice of International Commissions of Inquiry (Oxford University Press).
Professor Meierhenrich served as a Visiting Professional in Trial Chamber II at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, where he worked with Luis Moreno Ocampo, its first Prosecutor. His research has been supported by, among others, the American Bar Foundation, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Social Science Research Council. He recently spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton to work on his next monograph—The Everyday Life of International Law—an ethnography of the International Criminal Court.