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Media Relations

Experts & Speakers Faculty Profile

Timothy William Waters

Associate Professor of Law

Associate Professor of Law
School of Law—Bloomington

Interests:

Public international law, International criminal law, Judicial and prosecutorial law, European and Islamic law, Ethnic conflict, Transitional justice, Human rights, Citizenship, The legal profession

Education:

• B.A. in English literature, communications at UCLA, 1989
• M.S.L.I.S in East Central Europe, international law at Columbia University, 1998
• J.D. at Harvard Law School, 1999

Background:

• Received his B.A. magna cum laude from UCLA, where he was also a member of Phi Beta Kappa
• Earned his J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School
• Visiting Fellow and Visiting Scholar, Harvard Law School (2002-2005)
• International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (1999-2000)
• Peace Corps Volunteer, Hungary (1991-1994)

Professor Waters' scholarly interests include the structure of the inter-state system, ethnic conflict, human rights, transitional justice, and comparative law, especially in European and Islamic contexts. His principal research involves re-defining self-determination to devise an effective right of peaceful secession. He has published extensively in leading journals of international law, including Yale, Harvard, NYU, and Virginia, as well as area studies.

Waters is a frequent contributor to policy debate on international law and politics. His op-eds on Iraq, the Balkans, and international justice have appeared in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor. He has presented his work to universities, government bodies, and institutes in the U.S., Europe, Iran, and Israel.

Waters served as a consultant on legal system reform for the Open Society Institute, UNDP, and the Latvian Ministry of Justice, and on ethnic discrimination for Human Rights Watch. He also monitored implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords in Bosnia for the OSCE. And at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, he helped draft the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Hungary, where he first developed his interest in European issues and regulation of minority-majority conflicts.

While a Harvard Law School student, Waters held numerous fellowships, during which he continued research on law and ethnic conflict. In his graduate work at Columbia and at the University of Lund in Sweden and Bogazici University in Turkey, he focused on the study of East Central Europe.

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