Professor of Law; Director, Center for Transnational Business and the Law
B.A., Stanford; M.P.A., Princeton; J.D., Yale

Office Location: Hotung 6015

Assistant: Tommy Openchowski

Phone: 9687

Biography

 

Professor Carter has an extensive background in international and U.S. law, international business and trade, and foreign policy.  In 2006 he received Georgetown Law’s excellence in teaching award.  Mr. Carter also teaches frequently in developing countries about rule of law issues.  

He returned to Georgetown in 1996 after over three years as the Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration.  Mr. Carter also served during that time as the U.S. vice chair to Secretary of Defense William Perry on bilateral defense conversion committees with Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus, as the U.S. chair of the committee with Uzbekistan, and on committees with China.  He helped implement and enforce a variety of trade and nonproliferation laws, and he assisted countries in converting some of their defense facilities to civilian production, often in joint ventures with U.S. companies.

Before entering the government, Mr. Carter had been a Georgetown professor since 1979 and was Executive Director of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) during 1992-93.  He was a visiting law professor at Stanford in 1990.  He served as a senior counsel on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities in 1975.  He was a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1972.  A member of Dr. Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff from 1970-72, he worked on Europe and U.S.-Soviet issues.  While an Army officer, he was a program analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.  He has also been a trial and appellate lawyer in private practice in California and Washington, D.C.

Mr. Carter, a native Californian, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University, received a master's degree in economics and public policy from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and graduated from Yale Law School, where he was the Projects Editor of the Yale Law Journal. 

Prof. Carter's book on International Economic Sanctions: Improving the Haphazard U.S. Legal Regime (Cambridge Univ. Press: 1988) received the 1989 annual award from ASIL for the outstanding new book on international law subjects.  He is the co-author of the widely-used casebook on International Law (Aspen: 5th ed. 2007) and the editor of the accompanying Selected Documents (Aspen: 8th ed. 2007).  He has also written chapters in books as well as publishing articles in the Yale Law Journal, Scientific American, Washington Post, and other periodicals.

           He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Law Institute, the American Bar Association, and ASIL.  He is on the advisory council of a major insurance company and was on the board of directors of an international trading company.  He has served on two binational arbitration panels under the North American Free Trade Agreement.  He has also been the Chairman of the Advisory Committee of the Defense Budget Project and the Vice President of the Arms Control Association.