
Her 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 empirically evaluates thirty years of the Andean Tribunal’s litigation, explaining its successes and failures. Recently published 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 continues her research on international courts at the iCourts Center of Excellence, Copenhagen University Faculty of Law. She is also co-director of the Buffett Institute’s Global Capitalism and Law Research Group.



Alter teaches courses on International Law and International Relations, International Organizations, International Relations Theory, International Courts and Tribunals, and Ethics in International Affairs at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. She also participates in research training through the iCourts Center of Excellence, at the University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law.