Michael Kelly

president, AIDP, Creighton University School of Law

Professor Kelly coordinates the International and Comparative Law Program at Creighton University School of Law. He is the newly-elected president of the U.S. National Chapter of L'association International du Droit Pénal, a Paris-based society of international criminal law scholars, judges and attorneys founded in 1924 that enjoys consultative status with the United Nations. His research and teaching focuses on the fields of international and comparative law and Native American law. He is the author and co-author of four books and over thirty articles and book chapters in these areas, and his work is among the top 15% downloaded from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Professor Kelly has presented his views on U.N. Security Council reform to the Academic Council of the U.N. System in New York and has consulted with the Kurdish regional parliament in Erbil on drafting their new constitution under the federal law of Iraq. His Op-Ed columns have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, San Diego Union Tribune, Detroit News, Chicago Sun-Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Omaha World Herald; and he continues to serve as a Contributing Editor to the online legal newspaper JURIST. Professor Kelly wrote the grant that USAID awarded to the Law School calling for creation of a model Cuba/U.S. bilateral property claims settlement tribunal which can be offered to a transitional government in Havana after the Castro regime is gone. University Vice President Patrick Borchers led the team of six law and political science faculty tasked with building this model, which was reported out as a book on The Resolution of Outstanding Property Claims Between Cuba & the United States (Creighton University Press 2007). His other books include Ghosts of Halabja: Saddam Hussein & the Kurdish Genocide (Praeger 2008), with a foreword by Judge Ra'id Juhi al-Saedi, Nowhere to Hide: Defeat of the Sovereign Immunity Defense for Crimes of Genocide (Peter Lang 2005), with a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Equal Justice in the Balance: America's Legal Responses to the Emerging Terrorist Threat (University of Michigan Press 2004) co-authored with Raneta Lawson Mack, with a foreword by Michael Ratner. His most recent law review articles can be found in the international journals at UCLA, Case Western, Wisconsin and Cornell. Professor Kelly received his LL.M. in International & Comparative Law from Georgetown University and his J.D. and B.A. from Indiana University, where he served as an editor of the Indiana International & Comparative Law Review and president of the Student Bar Association. He was an attorney with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and, before joining the Creighton faculty in 2001, taught at Michigan State University College of Law.