2025 Folwell Lecture
Event details
Date: April 22, 2025
Location:
On Campus, On Campus, Rogalski Center
The 2025 Folwell Lecture will feature Leila Nadya Sadat, JD and her lecture "The Role of International Law in a World on Fire." The prestigious Folwell Chair Endowment was established in 2001 by Jane Folwell, an energetic volunteer and generous benefactor for educational, health and community groups and initiatives, including Junior Achievement, Genesis Health Services Foundation, and St. Ambrose University. Mrs. Folwell's husband, Frank, was a highly-respected Quad Cities businessman and philanthropist who passed away in 1997.
Professor Leila Nadya Sadat is the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law at Washington University and a former visitor at Yale Law School (2021-2024). She served as Special Adviser on Crimes Against Humanity to the ICC Prosecutor (2013-2023) and is an expert for the OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism. A prolific scholar, she has published over 180 works on international law and human rights. In 2008, she launched the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative to draft the first global treaty on the subject, leading its negotiation at the UN.
She also examines gun violence as a human rights crisis, recently publishing Torture in our Schools? in the Harvard Law Review. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Chair of the International Law Association (American Branch), she holds law degrees from Columbia, Tulane, and the Sorbonne. Before academia, she clerked and practiced law in the U.S. and France.
