Contact: Carl Smith

STARKVILLE, Miss.—An international law expert who previously worked in a variety of human rights-related roles throughout Europe is the featured speaker for this year’s Mississippi State Lamar Conerly Governance Lecture Series.

Timothy William Waters, the Richard S. Melvin Professor of Law and associate director of Indiana University’s Center for Constitutional Democracy, will present “Doing What We Can: International Law’s Failing Grotian Order” at 11 a.m., March 22 in Allen Hall’s Room 13. The free event is organized by the MSU Department of Political Science and Public Administration.

A graduate of UCLA, Columbia and Harvard Law School, Waters’ work focuses on the laws of war, international criminal law, secession and changes in states’ borders. He is the author of “Boxing Pandora: Rethinking Borders, States, and Secession in a Democratic World” (Yale, 2020) and editor of “The Milošević Trial: An Autopsy” (Oxford, 2013).

Waters is a frequent contributor to policy debate on international law and politics. He has published extensively in leading journals of international law and international relations, and his writings on Iraq, Ukraine, the Balkans and international justice, as well as gun rights and public discourse in America, have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Völkerrechtsblog, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and The Atlantic.

Before his stint in academia, Waters worked as a consultant on legal system reform for the Open Society Institute and on ethnic discrimination for Human Rights Watch, researcher at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, human rights officer in Bosnia for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and Peace Corps volunteer in Hungary.

The lecture is part of a series made possible by major support from Lamar Conerly, a 1971 MSU accounting/pre-law graduate and longtime partner in the Destin, Florida, law firm of Conerly, Bowman and Dykes LLP. Conerly is a former national MSU Alumni Association president and College of Business Alumni Fellow.

Due to Conerly’s generosity, the Governance Lecture Series is a free event open to students, faculty, staff, alumni and the general public.

For more information on Waters lecture, contact Quintara Miller, PSPA business coordinator, at 662-325-2711 or qmiller@pspa.msstate.edu.

The Department of Political Science and Public Administration is part of MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences. Visit www.cas.msstate.edu and www.pspa.msstate.edu to learn more about the college and department, respectively.

Mississippi State University is taking care of what matters. Learn more at www.msstate.edu.