
Alter’s award winning book
The New Terrain of International Law: Courts, Politics, Rights (Princeton University Press, 2014) provides a framework for comparing and understanding the influence of the twenty-four international courts, and for conceptualizing how different domains of domestic and international politics are transformed through the creation of international courts. Alter also co-edited the
Oxford Handbook on International Adjudication (Oxford University Press, 2014). Alter has published extensively on judicial politics in the European Union, including two books:
The European Court’s Political Power (Oxford University Press, 2009) and
Establishing the Supremacy of European Law (Oxford University press, 2001). She is a long-time collaborator with
Laurence R. Helfer researching the law and politics of international legal transplants in the
Andes and
Africa. Their book
Transplanting International Courts: The Law and Politics of the Andean Tribunal of Justice (Oxford University Press 2017, 2019), soon to be open-access in Spanish (2022), empirically evaluates thirty years of the Andean Tribunal’s litigation, explaining its successes and failures.
International Court Authority (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-edited with Laurence Helfer and Mikael Rask Madsen, includes a new approach to studying international court authority, applied by nineteen interdisciplinary scholars to thirteen different international courts.
Alter is co-director of Northwestern’s
Global Capitalism and Law Research Group. Her research has been supported by the
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation,
the American Academy of Berlin, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Howard Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the DAAD, and the Bourse
Chateaubriand Scientifique. Alter is member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, and has served on the editorial boards of
American Journal of International Law, International Organization, International Stud
ies Review, Journal of International Dispute Settlement, Law and Social Inquiry and European Union Politics. From July 2023-July 2024 Alter is a Senior Research Fellow at the U.S. Department of Commerce, at its Bureau of Industry and Security.
Alter teaches courses on International Law and International Relations, Global Capitalism and Law, International Organizations, International Relations Theory, International Courts and Tribunals, and Ethics in International Affairs at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. She is also a permanent visiting faculty at the iCourts Center of Excellence, at the University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law.