David Caron '83 is an expert in international law. He currently teaches public international law, resolution of private international disputes, ocean law and policy, and the advanced international law writing workshop.

Before joining the Boalt faculty in 1987, Caron practiced with the San Francisco firm of Pillsbury Madison & Sutro. From 1985 to 1986, he was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public and International Law. A Fulbright scholar and former navigator and salvage diver in the U.S. Coast Guard, Caron graduated from Boalt in 1983. He then served as a legal assistant to Judges Richard Mosk and Charles Brower at the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal in The Hague.

Among his professional affiliations, Caron is a vice president of the American Society of International Law, chair of the Advisory Board for the Institute of Transnational Arbitration of the Center for American and International Law and a member of the U.S. Department of State Advisory Committee on Public International Law. He is the co-director of Boalt's Law of the Sea Institute, an international consortium of scholars that has played a major part in studies of ocean law since the 1970s. He is a member of the NAFTA Chapter 11 Arbitration Panels in the matters of Glamis Gold v. The United States and Cargill Industries v. The United States of Mexico.

Caron has served as director of studies (1987), director of research (1995) and as a lecturer (2006) at the Hague Academy of International Law. He was a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law from 1990 to 2005 and received the 1991 Deak Prize of the American Society of International Law for outstanding scholarship by a younger academic. He has served as chair of the International Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, a member of the precedent panel of the U.N. Compensation Commission for claims arising out of the Gulf War, counsel for Ethiopia before the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission, and president of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes Tribunal in the matter of Aguas del Tunai v. The Republic of Bolivia. In 2000, he received the Stefan A. Riesenfeld Award of the University of California for outstanding achievement and contribution to the field of international law.

Caron's recent publications include The UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules: A Commentary (co authored with Lee Caplan and Matti Pellonpaa, 2006); Bringing New Law to Ocean Waters (coedited with Harry N. Scheiber, 2004); "Framing Political Theory of International Courts and Tribunals: Reflections at the Centennial," in Proceedings, 100th Annual Meeting, American Society of International Law (2006); "If Afghanistan has Failed, Then Afghanistan is Dead: 'Failed States' and the Inappropriate Substitution of Legal Conclusion for Political Description," in The Torture Debate in America (2005); "The United Nations Compensation Commission for Claims Arising Out of the 1991 Gulf War: The 'Arising Prior To' Decision," in the Florida State University Journal of Transnational Law & Policy(2005); "The Reconstruction of Iraq: Dealing with Debt," in the UC Davis Journal International Law & Policy (2004); and "Does International Law Matter" in Proceedings, 98th Annual Meeting, American Society of International Law (2004).

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