Siegfried Wiessner is a Professor of Law at St. Thomas University School of Law and the Founder and Director of its LL.M. and J.S.D. Programs in Intercultural Human Rights.  He holds a law degree (1977) as well as a Dr. iur. (1989) from the University of Tübingen and an LL.M. from Yale (1982). He is the Editor-in-Chief of Martinus Nijhoff’s Studies in Intercultural Human Rights. In fall 2009, he was a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. From 2007 to 2010, he was a member of the Executive Council of The American Society of International Law.  From 2008 to 2012, he served as the Chair of the International Law Association’s Committee on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.  It completed its task in Sofia, Bulgaria with ILA Resolution No. 5/2012 and a Final Report which recognized collective human rights and, in particular, indigenous peoples’ rights to their culture, self-government, and land under customary international law.

Professor Wiessner teaches U.S. Constitutional Law and International Law. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law, international law, human rights, indigenous law, the law of armed conflict, arbitration, space law and refugee law. His articles on the U.S. Constitution include, among others, Federalism:  An Architecture for Freedom, 1 New Europe L. Rev. 129 (1993) and The Powers of the President, 1  LMU L. Rev. 103 (2013).  His publications on international indigenous law include Rights and Status of Indigenous Peoples: A Global Comparative and International Legal Analysis, 12 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 57 (1999); Re-Enchanting the World:  Indigenous Peoples’ Rights as Essential Parts of a Holistic Human Rights Regime, 15 UCLA J. Int’l L. & Foreign Aff. 239 (2010); and The Cultural Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Achievements and Continuing Challenges, 22 Eur. J. Int’l L. 121 (2011).  His major contributions to the New Haven School of Jurisprudence include International Law in the 21st Century:  Decisionmaking in Institutionalized and Non-Institutionalized Settings, 26 Thesaurus Acroasium 129 (1997); Policy-Oriented Jurisprudence and Human Rights Abuses in Internal Conflict, 93 Am. J. Int’l L. 316 (1999, with Andrew Willard); Policy-Oriented Jurisprudence, 44 German Y.B. Int’l L. 96 (2001, with Andrew Willard); Law and Minimum World Public Order, with Myres McDougal, in Myres S. McDougal & Florentino P. Feliciano, The International Law of War xix (New Haven Press 1994); The New Haven School:  A Brief Introduction, 32 Yale J. Int’l L. 575 (2007, with Michael Reisman and Andrew Willard); and The New Haven School of Jurisprudence: A Universal Toolkit for Understanding and Shaping the Law, 18 Asia Pacific L. Rev. 45-61 (2010). In 1989, he published a book on the function of nationality (Die Funktion der Staatsangehörigkeit, Tübingen University Press), and he is the co-author, with Michael Reisman, Mahnoush Arsanjani and Gayl Westerman, of International Law in Contemporary Perspective (Foundation Press, 2004).  

On March 14, 2013, Professor Wiessner received the Law Professor of the Year Award by the humanitarian organization Lawyers to the Rescue.