As 2025 draws to a close, we’re looking back at the past year at Georgetown Law, from headline-grabbing guest speakers and alumni achievements to the work of students and faculty in clinics, courts and beyond.
“As you know, Argentina is experiencing a process of institutional strengthening — with a government that is convinced of the importance of changing an old paradigm, willing to bury bad habits and to give its citizens a sense of justice,” said Fernando Oris de Roa, Argentina’s Ambassador to the United States.
“Just as our recent wars have mostly been against those who are poor, those who can easily be demonized and viewed as ‘other’ by the average American — so too, our criminal law has tended to be enforced primarily and disproportionately against the poor and people of color,” said Professor Rosa Brooks, who was installed as Georgetown Law’s inaugural Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Policy on March 20.
Just before U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in Vietnam for a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un — the second such summit since June 2018 — the experts came to Georgetown Law for a conference on “The Continuing Threat of Nuclear Weapons.”
Each year, Georgetown Law welcomes students from more than 70 countries. But it’s not very often that international J.D. or LL.M. students extend an invitation to the president of their country to come to Georgetown for a visit.
Highlighting a historic human rights decision in India’s Supreme Court, the U.S.-Japan Partnership, foreign policy and much more, the Center for Asian Law is keeping Georgetown informed on important legal developments across the globe.
Diana Khleif (LL.M.’14) was studying law at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem when she joined the Center for Transnational Legal Studies (CTLS) in London in Spring 2013. CTLS was created by Georgetown Law and nine partner law schools around the globe to provide students and faculty with an international, comparative and transnational law experience unlike any other.
In the summer of 2016, Dean William M. Treanor met with Vibha Datta Makhija (LL.M.’92) — the youngest and the third woman to be designated as a Senior Advocate by the Supreme Court of India — in Washington, D.C. Treanor invited Makhija to join Georgetown Law’s Asian Law Alumni Advisory Board (AALAB). And since then, she’s only looked ahead.
“The problems that we are confronting, whether that’s the struggle around the world for good jobs that pay a living wage, whether that’s climate change, whether that’s the widening of the wealth gap or the rise of extremism and threats to national security — these are not problems…that can be solved by the United States alone,” Georgetown Law Professor from Practice Jennifer Hillman told a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on November 27.
Contemporary threats to security — noted Hina Jilani, the 2018-2019 Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Georgetown Law — go far beyond wars between states.
More than 90 refugee and migration judges from approximately 30 countries gathered at Georgetown Law in August, and with crushing caseloads and lives often in the balance, the issues were critical.