Zachary D. Kaufman

About

Zachary D. Kaufman, JD, PhD, was previously a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Kaufman is currently a lecturer in law and fellow at Stanford Law School, and a senior fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Kaufman previously taught in Yale University’s Department of Political Science and George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He also has held academic appointments at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Stanford University, and New York University.

Kaufman is the author or editor of three books: United States Law and Policy on Transitional Justice: Principles, Politics, and Pragmatics (2016), Social Entrepreneurship in the Age of Atrocities: Changing Our World (2012), and After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond (2009). He is also the author of more than forty articles and book chapters, most of which are available on his Social Science Research Network (SSRN) page. His work has been published by the Yale Journal of International Law, Harvard International Law Journal, Yale Law & Policy Review, Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, Emory International Law Review, and other journals.

Kaufman has served in all three branches of the US government. He was a US Supreme Court fellow, a Council on Foreign Relations international affairs fellow on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a clerk for the Honorable Juan Torruella on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In addition he served at the US Departments of State and Justice. He also has served at three international war crimes tribunals: the International Criminal Court (where he was the first American to serve) as well as the UN International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda, and for the Former Yugoslavia. In the private sector Kaufman has practiced law at O’Melveny & Myers LLP and worked at Google.

A term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Kaufman received his PhD and MPhil., both in international relations, from Oxford University (where he was a Marshall Scholar); his JD from Yale Law School (where he was an Olin Fellow, editor in chief of the Yale Law & Policy Review, managing editor of the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, articles editor of the Yale Journal of International Law, and cofounder and copresident of Yale Law Social Entrepreneurs), and his BA in political science from Yale University (where he was the student body president).