Gregory S. Gordon, associate professor of law and director of the Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies, will present the third lecture of the University Faculty Lecture Series for 2011-2012.

The upcoming lecture is titled "The Next Chapter in International Speech –Crime Law? Incitement to Commit War Crimes" and will be presented on Thursday, Feb. 9, at the North Dakota Museum of Art. A reception starts at 4 p.m., followed by the lecture at 4:30 p.m.

The lecture series is free and open to the public.

Gregory S. Gordon:

Gregory S. Gordon, Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies director, teaches criminal law, criminal procedure, international law and international human rights law. He earned his bachelor’s and juris doctor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a law clerk to U. S. District Court Judge Martin Pence, D-Hawaii, and a litigator in San Francisco. He also served as a legal officer and deputy team leader for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for the landmark “media” cases, the first post-Nuremberg prosecutions of radio and print media executives for incitement to genocide. For this work, Gordon was commended by U.S. Attorney General Jane Reno.

He became a “white-collar” criminal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Tax Division. Following a detail as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, he was the Tax Division's liaison to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (Pacific Region), for which he prosecuted large narcotics trafficking rings. He also went to Sierra Leone for a post-civil war justice assessment for the DOJ's Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance and Training. In 2003, he joined the Criminal Division's Office of Special Investigations to prosecute modern human rights violators.

Gordon has been featured by media organizations around the world as an expert on war crimes prosecution and lectured at the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) School, the Truman Presidential Museum and Library and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He contributed to the Holocaust Museum's influential "Voices on Antisemitism" podcast series, spoke before the British and Canadian Parliaments and has shared the dais with former U.N. Ambassadors Richard Holbrooke and Andrew Young. He trained high-level federal prosecutors in Ethiopia, and was a hand-selected United Nation’s consultant in Cambodia for prosecutors of the Khmer Rouge genocide trials. In December 2011, he trained lawyers and judges for war crimes at the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

His scholarship on international criminal law has been published in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law and the Virginia Journal of International Law and he has presented at Yale University, Georgetown University Law Center, Emory University and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He also organized the successful John F. Kennedy Interdisciplinary Conference at UND, featuring the late Ted Sorenson among other prominent JFK experts. He was the inaugural winner of the North Dakota Spirit Law School Faculty Achievement Award in 2009.

Last year, Gordon co-wrote the U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief of Holocaust and Darfur Genocide survivors in the historic human rights case Yousuf v. Samantar. He also represented the International League for Human Rights at the International Criminal Court Conference in Uganda.

Gordon, as director of the CHRGS, has worked with regional and national human rights groups to bring experts and survivors of Nazi and other modern atrocities to UND.