Professor David Kennedy

Director 
The Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) At Harvard Law School

The Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) at Harvard Law School is a collaborative faculty effort to nurture innovative approaches to global policy in the face of a legal and institutional architecture manifestly ill-equipped to address our most urgent global challenges. Global poverty, conflict, injustice and inequality are also legal and institutional regimes. The IGLP explores the ways in which they are reproduced and what might be done in response. They aim to provide a platform at Harvard for new thinking about international legal and institutional arrangements, with particular emphasis on ideas and issues of importance to the global South. 

The Institute focuses on young scholars and policy makers who bring new ideas and perspectives to comparative and international legal research and policy. The IGLP aims to facilitate the emergence of a creative dialog among young experts from around the world, strengthening our global capacity for innovation and cooperative research. Each year, The IGLP sponsors a variety of conferences, workshops and symposia, both in Cambridge and in collaboration with friends abroad. The IGLP regularly hosts both scholars and policy practitioners as Visiting Researchers and Fellows at Harvard, deepening their collaborative network among those seeking new approaches to international law, political economy and economic development from governments, international institutions, the private sector and the non-governmental sector.

Over the last years, the IGLP has developed a large global network of scholars and policy makers who share their belief that ideas matter, and their commitment to new voices and viewpoints for thinking about global governance, social justice and economic policy. Their common goal is to better understand how power is exercised in the world today, and how original and critical thinking can transform the ways in which policy experts, intellectual leaders and citizens understand our common global situation.