The Center for International and Comparative Law

Advisory Board

The Emory University School of Law Center for International and Comparative Law’s mission is to support cutting-edge scholarship in international and comparative law, foster expertise, professionalism, and knowledge in our students, and cultivate the spirit of community grounded in curiosity, open mindedness and learning.

That mission is supported by the CICL Advisory Board, whose members are listed below.

Mary E. Bartkus is Special Counsel, Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP. Previously, she was Executive Director and Senior Counsel, Merck & Co., Inc., responsible for international litigation and international arbitration, including multijurisdictional and cross border class, group, and other multi-party and complex litigation in jurisdictions worldwide. She is a member of the New Jersey and New York bars and is admitted to practice before the United States District Courts for the District of New Jersey and the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, the United States Courts of Appeals for the Second, Third, Ninth, District of Columbia, and Federal Circuits, and the United States Supreme Court.

Mary E. Bartkus is a Master of the Bench of the John C. Lifland American Inn of Court, an Inn focused on intellectual property and federal practice, served as a Director of the Inn from 2019-2023, and is a member of the Inn’s Executive Board. She is a member of the AAA-ICDR’s International, Life Sciences and Commercial Panels. Her publications include Collective Litigation in Europe: Law and Practice (Mary E. Bartkus, Magdalena Tulibacka, István Varga & Stefaan Voet eds., 2025).

Christopher Hodges OBE is Emeritus Professor of Justice Systems, Oxford University. He has a global reputation in regulatory and dispute resolution systems, advising governments, regulators, judiciary, ombudsmen, and businesses around the globe. He is Chair of: UK Government’s Regulatory Horizons Council; the Advisory Board of the government compensation schemes for Post Office Horizon victims; and the Housing and Property Redress Group. He was recently a member of the Civil Justice Council’s Working Group on regulation of Third Party Funding. He is a founder of the International Network for Delivery of Regulation. He has held a Chair at Erasmus University, and Visiting Chairs in Beijing, Leuven and ANU Canberra; he has been a Fellow of the European Law Institute.

Livingstone Johnson is the Associate General Counsel for The Coca-Cola Company’s Global Supply Chain where he serves as a member of the Company’s Global Legal Leadership Team and leads the team supporting Technical, Innovation, Research & Development, Global Procurement, Global Concentrate Supply, Global IT and Global Marketing Partnerships (Sports, Music, Entertainment). His role was also recently expanded to include leadership of Global Human Rights for Coca-Cola.

Prior to his current role, he held a number of notable positions at the Company including General Counsel for The Coca-Cola Foundation, Business Unit Counsel for Great Britain and Ireland (based in London) and Chief of Staff to Geoffrey J. Kelly, Senior Vice-President and General Counsel, from 2008 until 2011.

Liv joined Coca-Cola in January 2003 after five years with Merck & Co., Inc., and prior to that, he spent approximately five years in private law firm practice in Philadelphia.

Liv received an A.B. degree from Princeton University in 1990 and his J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1993.

He is married to Elisabeth Remy Johnson, Principal Harpist of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and they have two kids, Lily (15) and Alex (13).

Sam Kaywood is Senior Counsel, Alston & Bird in Atlanta.

John Parkerson is an attorney in the international practice group at Chalmers, Adams, Backer & Kaufman, LLC. His law practice focuses on international business and related corporate and commercial matters, international regulatory compliance, export/import, international aviation, national security law and governmental affairs. He is co-owner of a boutique consulting company, P&S International Strategies, that assists primarily Central and Eastern European SMEs with international business expansion. Parkerson is Adjunct Professor in the MBA "International Practicum" program at Georgia Tech's Scheller College of Business and a frequent lecturer at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. He formerly was adjunct professor of Contract Drafting at Emory University School of Law.

Parkerson was an international attorney in Delta Air Lines' Law Department from 1993-2008. Before Delta, he served as Judge Advocate General ("JAG") Army officer in a variety of international law assignments including the Pentagon, the U.S. Embassy in Germany, and Professor of International and Operational Law at the U.S. Military Academy/West Point.

Parkerson serves as Honorary Consul General and Foreign Economic Counselor of Hungary. He focuses primarily on cultivating business, educational and cultural ties between Hungary, on the one hand; and companies, institutions and individuals in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina. The Government of Hungary awarded Parkerson the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit, its highest honor for foreign citizens.

Parkerson serves on the Georgia District Export Council of the U.S. Department of Commerce. He holds leadership roles in numerous civic and charitable organizations, including past President of the World Trade Center Atlanta, and current Secretary of the Atlanta Consular Corps Board. Parkerson also holds board positions on the State Bar of Georgia’s International Law Section.

Parkerson holds B.A. (European History), M.A. (Diplomatic History) and JD (Law) degrees from Emory University; an M.A. (International Relations) from Boston University; and an LL.M (International and Comparative Law) from the George Washington University. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army’s Command & General Staff College and completed the Public International Law course of study at The Hague Academy of International Law.

Teemu Ruskola is Professor of Law and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Penn, he was Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law at Emory University. He is interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of international law and comparative law, frequently with China as a vantage point. He is the author of Legal Orientalism: China, the United States and Modern Law (Harvard UP 2013) and The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class (Verso Books, forthcoming 2026), among other works.”

Stefaan Voet studied law at Ghent University (2001). In 2011 he wrote his PhD thesis about complex litigation in Belgium, for which he received in 2014 the Triannual Price of Civil Procedure awarded by the vzw Algemene Modellenverzamelingvoor de Rechtspraktijk.

Since 2015, he has been a professor of civil procedure at KU Leuven and a host professor at the University of Hasselt. Voet was a visiting scholar at the University of Houston (2009) and Stanford Law School (2014). He was a visiting lecturer/professor at the University of Houston, SMU Dedman School of Law in Dallas, University of Tennessee, Syracuse University, China-EU School of Law in Beijing, University of Pavia, University of Pretoria, University of Texas at Austin and EMARF (Escola da Magistratura Regional Federal da 2E Regiao) in Rio de Janeiro.

In 2016-2017, he held the TPR (Tijdschrift voor Privaatrecht) Chair at the University of Utrecht (Molengraaff Institute for Private Law). In 2020, he was an external scientific fellow at the (former) Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European and Regulatory Procedural Law. He is a member of different working groups of the European Law Institute.

Voet is also a substitute appellate judge in the Court of Appeal Ghent and a member of the board of directors of Ombudsfin. In 2025, he was appointed (as ‘Kwartiermaker’) by the Dutch Minister of Justice and the Minister of Legal Protection to advise them on reforming the mediation landscape in the Netherlands.

Laurie R. Blank is a clinical professor of Law and director of the International Humanitarian Law Clinic at Emory University School of Law, where she teaches the law of armed conflict and works directly with students to provide assistance to international tribunals, non-governmental organizations and militaries around the world on cutting edge issues in international law and armed conflict. During the 2022-2024 academic years, she served as special counsel to the general counsel at the US Department of Defense.

Blank’s latest book is International Conflict and Security Law, and she is co-author of International Law and Armed Conflict: Fundamental Principles and Contemporary Challenges in the Law of War, a casebook on the law of war. She is also the co-director of the End of War Project, a multi-year project exploring a range of legal, policy, moral and strategic challenges in ending complex counterterrorism and counterinsurgency conflicts. Professor Blank has served as a Senior Fellow at the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare and at the Stockton Center for International Law, and was as a core expert on the Woomera Manual on International Law of Military Space Operations and the Oslo Manual on Selected Problems in the Law of Armed Conflict.

S. I. Strong specializes in comparative and private international law, with a particular emphasis on international commercial dispute resolution (litigation, arbitration and mediation), large-scale (class and collective) suits. She has also written extensively on the use of artificial intelligence in civil justice systems, primarily from an interdisciplinary perspective. Prior to joining Emory, Prof. Strong taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford in the United Kingdom and the University of Sydney in Australia as well as Georgetown University and the University of Missouri in the United States.

Strong is an experienced practitioner, having acted as counsel at Baker & McKenzie after working as a dual-qualified lawyer (US attorney and English solicitor) in the New York and London offices of Weil, Gotshal & Manges. Strong has published over 130 award-winning books, chapters and articles in Europe, Asia and the Americas, including Legal Reasoning Across Commercial Disputes: Comparing Judicial and Arbitral Analyses (2020), Arbitration of Trust Disputes: Issues in National and International Law (2016), Class, Mass, and Collective Arbitration in National and International Law (2013) and Research and Practice in International Commercial Arbitration: Sources and Strategies (2009), all from Oxford University Press. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of Arbitration: The Journal of International Arbitration, Mediation and Dispute Management.

Strong’s scholarly work has been translated into Spanish, French, Russian and Chinese and has been cited as authority by numerous state and federal courts and international tribunals. Strong, who holds a PhD in law from the University of Cambridge, a DPhil from the University of Oxford, a JD from Duke University, an MPW from the University of Southern California and a BA from the University of California, Davis, sits as an arbitrator on a variety of international commercial and trust-related matters.

Martin Sybblis is a legal sociologist whose research seeks to understand how communities approach business law reforms, especially those that promise economic growth. At the core, his research is driven by an interest in the economic sociology of law and development.

Sybblis joined the Emory Law faculty in 2019. Immediately prior to joining Emory, he received a PhD in sociology from Princeton University where he received Princeton University’s Harold W. Dodds Fellowship and the Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship. During his doctoral studies, Sybblis was a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Sybblis earned his JD from the University of Michigan Law School. He also earned master's degrees in sociology and public policy, both from Princeton University. Sybblis received his BA magna cum laude from the University of Connecticut. He is a member of the Bar of the United States Supreme Court and the state bars of Massachusetts, Florida, and the District of Columbia.

Prior to his graduate studies, Sybblis served as: a law clerk to the Honorable Marcia G. Cooke, United States District Court, Southern District of Florida; a corporate associate at Bingham McCutchen (now Morgan Lewis); an assistant county attorney at Miami-Dade County; and a consultant at the World Bank in connection with the Caribbean Growth Forum, an initiative led by the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the Caribbean Development Bank.

Sybblis' courses include Contracts, Commercial Law, and Law and Economic Development.

John Witte Jr. J.D. (Harvard); Dr. Theol. h.c. (Heidelberg), is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor of Religion, and faculty director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. A specialist in legal history, human rights, religious freedom, family law, and law & religion, he has published 325 articles, 19 journal symposia, and 45 books.

His major books include: Law and Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002); The Reformation of Rights (Cambridge, 2007); Christianity and Law (Cambridge, 2008); The Sins of the Fathers (Cambridge, 2009); Christianity and Human Rights (Cambridge, 2010); Religion and Human Rights (Oxford, 2012); From Sacrament to Contract, 2d ed. (Westminster John Knox, 2012); No Establishment of Religion (Oxford, 2012); The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy (Cambridge, 2015); Christianity and Family Law (Cambridge, 2017); Church, State, and Family (Cambridge, 2019); The Blessings of Liberty (Cambridge, 2021); Faith, Freedom, and Family (Mohr Siebeck, 2021); Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 5^th ed. (Oxford, 2022); In Defense of the Marital Family (Brill, 2023); Table Talk (Brill, 2024); and The Oxford Handbook of Christianity and Law (Oxford, 2024).

Some of Witte's writings have appeared in fifteen languages, and he has delivered more than 425 public lectures throughout the world. Recent lectures include the Franke Lectures at Yale, the Pennington Lectures at Heidelberg, the Jefferson Lectures at Berkeley, the Beatty Lectures at McGill, the Cunningham Lectures at Edinburgh, the McDonald Lectures at Oxford, the True Lectures at Notre Dame, and the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen.

With $27 million of funding raised from the Pew, Ford, Lilly, Luce, and McDonald foundations, and other benefactors, Witte has directed 20 major international projects on democracy, human rights, and religious liberty; on marriage, family, and children; and on law and Christianity – collectively yielding nearly 400 new volumes and journal symposia. He is editor of Emory Studies in Law and Religion (Eerdmans) and Cambridge Studies in Law and Christianity (Cambridge), and he coedits the Journal of Law and Religion, Brill Research Perspectives on Law and Religion, the new Spanish Colección Raíces del Derecho(Aranzadi), and the new Chinese Law, Religion and Culture Series (Bouden House). Witte has won dozens of awards and prizes for his teaching and research including induction into the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation in Spain and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Richard D. Freer is dean and Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. Freer is a noted scholar of civil procedure, federal jurisdiction, and complex litigation. He has authored or co-authored 17 books and dozens of journal articles and essays. His work has been cited by state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States. He is an elected life member of the American Law Institute and serves as an academic fellow of the National Civil Justice Institute. He is the only person to serve as contributing author to both standard multivolume treatises on federal jurisdiction and practice: Moore’s Federal Practice and Wright & Miller’s Federal Practice and Procedure.

Eleven Emory Law graduating classes have named Freer Most Outstanding Professor. He is a recipient of Emory University’s highest teaching recognition, the Emory Williams University Teaching Award, and of Emory University’s Scholar/Teacher Award. He delivered the 2024 John F. Morgan Sr. Distinguished Faculty Lecture. As a bar review lecturer for more than 30 years, he has lectured to more than 500,000 bar exam candidates nationwide.

Through his 41 years on the faculty, in various leadership roles—including the university associate vice provost for academic affairs, Emory Law associate dean of faculty, chair of the university’s Tenure and Promotion Advisory Committee and chair of more than a dozen law school committees—Freer has championed a collaborative approach to decision-making. His priorities flow from the core law school mission of preparing principled, sophisticated lawyers who can thrive and lead in any milieu. He sees the two pillars of that mission as academic eminence and student flourishing – an integrated and innovative network of support allowing students to define and pursue their unique path to professional excellence.

Following graduation from UCLA School of Law, Freer clerked for two federal judges and litigated with the Los Angeles firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. He has served as a visiting professor at George Washington University, Central European University in Budapest, Moscow State University in Russia, the University of Warsaw in Poland, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. He served on the UC San Diego Athletics Advisory Board.