Gregory S. Gordon
Professor Gregory S. Gordon is Director of the University of North Dakota (UND) Center for Human Rights & Genocide Studies and teaches at the UND School of Law in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, international law and international human rights law. In 2009, he was the law school’s inaugural winner of the North Dakota Spirit Faculty Achievement Award. Professor Gordon earned his Bachelor of Arts degree (summa cum laude) and Juris Doctor at the University of California at Berkeley. He then served as law clerk to U. S. District Court Judge Martin Pence (D. Haw.). After a stint as a litigator in San Francisco, he worked with the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where he served as Legal Officer and Deputy Team Leader for the landmark “media” cases, the first international post-Nuremberg prosecutions of radio and print media executives for incitement to genocide. For this work, Professor Gordon received a commendation from Attorney General Janet Reno for “Service to the United States and International Justice.” After his experience at ICTR, he became a white-collar criminal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, Tax Division. Following a detail as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, he was appointed as the Tax Division’s Liaison to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (Pacific Region) for which he helped prosecute large narcotics trafficking rings. Also during this time, he was detailed to Sierra Leone to conduct a post-civil war justice assessment for DOJ’s Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance, and Training. In 2003, he joined the Criminal Division’s Office of Special Investigations, where he helped investigate and prosecute Nazi war criminals and modern human rights violators (focusing on Africa).
Professor Gordon has been featured on C-SPAN, Voice of America, NPR, BBC and Radio France Internationale as an expert on war crimes prosecution and has lectured on that subject at the U.S. Army J.A.G. School, the Harry S. Truman Presidential Museum and Library and to members of the British and Canadian Parliaments. He has been featured on the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s “Voices on Antisemitism” series. And he has been honored to share the dais at conferences with former U.N. Ambassadors Andrew Young and Richard Holbrooke as well as former Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues David Scheffer. On behalf of the Ethiopian government, Professor Gordon has trained high-level federal prosecutors in Addis Ababa. His scholarship, which has been published in leading international journals such as the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law and the Virginia Journal of International Law, has increasingly focused on incitement law. His article From Incitement to Indictment? Prosecuting Iran’s President for Advocating Israel’s Destruction and Piecing Together Incitement Law’s Emerging Analytical Framework was recently published in Northwestern University’s Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology. Professor Gordon has presented his work at institutions such as Yale University, Georgetown University Law Center and Emory University.
Related Link
Voices on Antisemitism podcast »
Select Publications
‘A War of Media, Words, Newspapers and Television Stations’: The ICTR Media Trial Verdict and a New Chapter in the International Law of Hate Speech.” Virginia Journal of International Law 45 (2004): 139.
“Complementarity and Alternative Justice.” Oregon Law Review 88 (2009).
Encyclopedia of Genocide. Co-Legal Editor. Vol. 2. Forthcoming.
“Genocide: The Year in Review 2008.” Genocide Prevention Now. Forthcoming. Web.
Incitement as a War Crime. Forthcoming.
