Betsy Baker

Betsy Baker is an internationally recognized expert on Arctic law and policy, a reputation that builds on her work in Europe and the United States on law of the sea, international environmental law, comparative law, property, and Canadian-U.S. cooperation. Her writing on legal aspects of continental shelf mapping landed her on the US Coast Guard icebreaker, the Healy, as a member of the science crew for two Arctic extended continental shelf mapping deployments to the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas, sponsored by the State Department in 2008 and 2009. For 2009-2010 she was selected as a Dickey Research Fellow, Institute of Arctic Studies, Dartmouth College.

Baker’s research and policy work includes commissioned papers on offshore oil and gas regulation for the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and Inuit Leaders Summit on Resource Development; presentations to the Arctic Ocean Review project of the Protection of the Marine Environment (PAME) working group of the Arctic Council; and proposed Common Precepts for Marine Scientific Research Access to the Arctic Ocean, developed with colleagues at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks for a German Foreign Ministry conference on climate change and the Arctic. At the VLS Institute for Energy and the Environment, Baker serves as project lead for the Resource Extraction Team, whose rcent publications include White Papers comparing regulation of offshore hydrocarbon activity in Canada and the United States, and in Greenland and the Russian Federation.

Before returning to the United States 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. She has recently published a first article in an Ocean Yearbook series on the scholarly work of ocean activist, Elisabeth Mann Borgese.

Baker is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the American Society of Comparative Law and the American Society of International Law. She chairs the Arctic Oil and Gas working group of the University of the Arctic’s Arctic Law Thematic Network, serves on the Advisory Board for the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security at the University of Vermont, and is an Executive Committee member of the AALS Section on North American Cooperation.