The Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver is the former President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States (OAS), the first American ever to head a principal organ of the OAS. He has also served as President of the University of New Mexico. Currently He is Honorary Professor of Peking University and Director of the Center for China-United States Cooperation. Within the United states Government, he has served as special assistant first to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense and then to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. He has taught law at Columbia University, American University, Rutgers, Tulane and Harvard and international relations at Cambridge University, Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. And he has been a Senior Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
His articles have appeared in such journals as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the New York and London Review of Books, International Organization, World Politics and the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews. Shorter pieces have appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune and the Washington Post. He has lectured widely at universities and research centers in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, Japan and China.
Dean Farer has studied processes of economic and political development outside Europe and North American and has also been a participant. He has taught criminal law and procedure and unarmed self-defense to an African police force and assisted in Uganda’s Constitutional revision process in 1994-95. He has also studied the operations of international organizations and in 1993 served as legal consultant to the United Nations Operation in Somalia. In that capacity, he investigated the attacks on UN forces and submitted a report to the Security Council. In 1980, he participated in the successful resolution of the hostage crisis arising from the occupation of the Dominican Embassy in Bogota, Colombia by members of the M-19 guerilla organization.
At present, he serves on the board of the Social Science Foundation, the Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch/Americas and the editorial boards of Human Rights Quarterly and the American Journal of International Law and on the editorial advisory boards of the Chinese Journal of International Law and the Strategic Studies Quarterly. He is married and has two children and claims to play tennis with more passion than skill, to play golf with barely controllable passion, and to ski with excessive prudence. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and The Cosmos Club of Washington D.C.
He is a Magna cum Laude graduate of Princeton and the Harvard Law School where he served as Note Editor of the Law Review. In his final year at Harvard he was appointed clerk for Judge Learned Hand.
