A leader in international economic law and procedure, Professor Kathleen Claussen has served as arbitrator, counsel, expert, public servant, and teacher. Her expertise covers several topics of international law, especially trade, investment, international business and labor; dispute settlement and international dispute bodies; national security and cybersecurity law; and, administrative law issues surrounding U.S. foreign relations and transnational agreements. Professor Claussen has testified before the U.S. Congress and European Parliament on topics related to trade agreements, U.S. tariff laws, and executive power, on which she is a leading authority.

Professor Claussen’s academic work has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review, among others, as well as in leading international law journals. One of her articles on international investment disputes, The International Claims Trade, was awarded the Smit-Lowenfeld Prize in International Arbitration. She also blogs at Lawfare, Just Security (where she is a member of the Editorial Board), and the International Economic Law & Policy Blog, and is regularly featured on or consulted as an expert for various media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Marketplace, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times.

Professor Claussen has served as an arbitrator, as counsel, or as counsel to the tribunal in more than a dozen international trade and investment cases. She appears on multiple international arbitration rosters maintained by governments for their state-to-state disputes. In 2024, she was one of four individuals named by the White House to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) Panel of Conciliators. She is also a member of the Academic Council of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration and the Academic Forum on Investor-State Dispute Settlement.

Professor Claussen has served as a visiting faculty member or invited researcher at numerous institutions around the world, including Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the University of Cambridge Lauterpacht Centre for International Law where she was a Brandon Fellow, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, the iCourts Center of Excellence at the University of Copenhagen, the George C. Marshall Center for Security Studies, the University of Zurich and Collegium Helveticum, and the World Trade Institute. In 2024, she was a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute and in 2025, she is the Allen and Gledhill Visiting Scholar at Singapore Management University.

Professor Claussen holds several leadership positions within international law and arbitration professional associations. In 2021, she was appointed co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Economic Law, published by Oxford University Press. In 2025, she was elected to the editorial board of the American Journal of International Law, published by Cambridge University Press. Her other recent governance appointments include the American Society of International Law (ASIL) International Economic Law Interest Group, the ASIL Executive Council & Executive Committee, and the Junior International Law Scholars Association. In addition, Professor Claussen is an Adviser for the American Law Institute’s Restatement on Foreign Relations Law, and a member of the Global Future Council on International Trade and Investment for the World Economic Forum.

Since 2024, Professor Claussen has been Managing Faculty Co-Director of Georgetown’s widely acclaimed Institute of International Economic Law, overseeing the Institute’s programming, as well as its budget and administration. She also is the co-founder of SAILS: the Consortium for the Study and Analysis of International Law Scholarship.

Before joining the academy, Professor Claussen was Associate General Counsel at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) in the Executive Office of the President. There, she represented the United States in trade dispute proceedings and served as a legal advisor for the United States in international trade negotiations. She also worked on economic security issues on behalf of USTR at the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force. In 2020-2021, she was an invited member of the Biden-Harris Transition Team, covering trade, commerce, and development agencies.

Earlier in her career, Professor Claussen was Legal Counsel at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague where she advised on disputes between countries, and on investment and commercial arbitrations involving countries and international organizations. She also clerked for the Honorable David F. Hamilton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. At Yale, Professor Claussen served on the board of the Yale Law Journal and was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of International Law. She was awarded the Jerome Sayles Hess Fund Prize for excellence in international law and the Howard M. Holtzmann Fellowship in international dispute resolution.