Betsy Baker

The last thing Betsy Baker thought she would be doing when she graduated from law school in her hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., was sitting night watch in the belly of an icebreaker with a host of marine geophysicists somewhere in the Arctic Ocean.

Teaching and writing about law of the sea is what landed her on the USCGC Healy law of the sea mapping cruises for 2008 and 2009. When on land, she teaches comparative law, international law, property, and an evolving seminar on the Arctic and the law of the sea. Building on her work in the Arctic, for 2009-2010 she will be a Research Fellow at Dartmouth College, with the Dickey Center for International Understanding and its Institute of Arctic Studies.

Before returning to the US to oversee the graduate program for international students at Harvard Law School from 2003-2007, Betsy spent more than a decade in Germany, where she obtained her doctorate in law, worked as legal historian at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and was affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. Legal biography, a first love, led to her first book: Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Francis Lieber und das moderne Völkerrecht 1861-1881. Betsy earned her BA from Northwestern, her JD from Michigan, and both the LLM and Dr. iur. degrees from Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel, Germany. Current writing projects include proposals for Canadian-US cooperation in maritime issues and examining the law-science interface in environmental treaties and legislation.