Professor

Anna

Spain Bradley

Anna Spain Bradley holds the MacArthur Foundation Chair in International Justice and Human Rights and is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. From 2020-23 she was the Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at UCLA and in 2025 she was appointed Faculty Director of The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA.

Professor Spain Bradley is a scholar of international law, international dispute resolution, human rights and peace.

She is the author of Global Racism: A Challenge for the World (Oxford University Press, forthcoming October 2026) and Human Choice in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and co-editor of International Dispute Resolution (3rd ed., Carolina Academic Press, 2021). Her seminal law review article Human Rights Racism (2019) exposed racism as an undefined violation of human rights under international law. Her current research examines judicial decisionmaking and emotion at the International Court of Justice and the future of peace and world order. Professor Spain Bradley’s scholarship has been recognized with the 2018 Gamm Justice Award for outstanding contributions to justice and the 2014 Francis Lieber Award from the American Society of International Law for exceptional scholarship on the law of war. She advances her research through collaborations with the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and the University of Hamburg’s Institute of Law and Economics.

Professor Spain Bradley has a distinguished record of public service and international leadership. In 2024, she was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden to the World Bank ICSID Panel of Conciliators. In 2021, she was appointed as a Legal Expert to the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee addressing the prevention of racist and xenophobic discrimination. That year, she was also elected Vice President of the American Society of International Law and previously served on its Executive Council for two terms. She served as Vice Chair of the Academic Council of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Earlier in her career, she represented states as counsel before the Permanent Court of Arbitration and served as an Attorney-Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where she received two Meritorious Honor Awards for her work before the Iran–U.S. Claims Tribunal and the United Nations Compensation Commission. She held positions at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, focusing on climate policy and international trade. 

Professor Spain Bradley holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. magna cum laude from Denison University and clerked for the Honorable Judge Raymond L. Finch of the U.S. District Court of the Virgin Islands.