One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom

Simon Chesterman is Global Professor and Director of the New York University School of Law Singapore Programme, and Vice Dean (Graduate Studies) and Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law. From 2004 to 2006 he was Executive Director of NYU’s Institute for International Law and Justice, of which he remains a senior fellow.

Educated in Melbourne, Beijing, Amsterdam, and Oxford, Chesterman has written widely on international institutions, international criminal law, human rights, the use of force, and post-conflict reconstruction.

Prior to joining NYU, he was a Senior Associate at the International Peace Academy and Director of UN Relations at the International Crisis Group in New York. He has previously worked for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Belgrade and interned at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha. His teaching experience includes periods at the Universities of Melbourne, Oxford, Southampton, and Columbia.

Chesterman’s books include Law and Practice of the United Nations (with Thomas M. Franck and David M. Malone, Oxford University Press, 2008); You, The People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford University Press, 2004); and Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2001), which was awarded the American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit. His edited volumes include Secretary or General? The UN Secretary-General in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Making States Work: State Failure and the Crisis of Governance (edited with Michael Ignatieff and Ramesh Thakur, United Nations University Press, 2005). He regularly contributes to international law and political science journals, as well as mass media publications such as the International Herald Tribune.

Moderator:

Stephen Holmes is a faculty advisor at the Center on Law and Security and the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. His fields of specialization include the history of liberalism, the disappointments of democratization after communism, and the difficulty of combating terrorism within the limits of liberal constitutionalism. In 2003, he was selected as a Carnegie Scholar. From 1997 to 2000, he was a professor of politics at Princeton. From 1985 to 1997, he was professor of politics and law at the Law School and Political Science Department of the University of Chicago. From 1979 to 1985, he taught at the Department of Government at Harvard University. He was also the editor-in-chief of the East European Constitutional Review from 1993-2003. He is the author of Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Yale University Press, 1984), The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Harvard University Press, 1993), Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and co-author (with Cass Sunstein) of The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (Norton, 1999), and most recently, The Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2007).