Karen J. Alter is the Norman Dwight Harris Professor of International Relations, and  an expert in the politics of international law, and global economic governance. She is the author or editor of six books and over seventy articles and book chapters. Her interests span international relations, multilateralism, the law and politics of international courts, international regime complexity, backlash politics, global ethics and global capitalism and law.  You can read about Alter’s newest work examining the legal underpinnings of global capitalism here.  She also has new work on backlash politics and the contested authority of international institutions, and new work questioning how China’s rise may transform the international order.

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 Studies 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.