Who We Are
The John Hazard Institute is a 501(c)(3) public charity, organized to provide three-year international comparative law fellowships to enable young (under-36) American lawyers who have passed a U.S. bar exam to study the law, language, and law culture of countries — particularly  ”difficult” countries — crucial to U.S understanding of international affairs.

Why We’re Needed
In an age of international confrontation, more than 50 Law-School Deans, international jurists, senior law professors and experienced foreign-policy practitioners visited by the Hazard Institute’s director affirm that there is a serious and continuing shortage of American negotiators and teachers with in-depth, cross-cultural understanding of the language, laws, law culture and law practicalities of crucial nations.

History & Background
The Institute is named for John Newbold Hazard who, fresh out of Harvard Law School, was sent by a small international-affairs foundation (The Institute of Current World Affairs, or ICWA) to the Soviet Union in 1934, the year after its revolutionary government was recognized by the United States. He returned to become a seminal professor of International Law at Columbia Law School, a founder of the Russian Institute (now the Harriman Institute) at Columbia University, a consummate U.S.-Soviet negotiator (Lend-Lease) during World War II and a continuing bridge of U.S.-Russian negotiation and understanding until his death in 1985. The Executive Director and many of the Trustees were his lifelong friends and associates.

The Trustees
Judge Charles Brower of the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in The Hague; NYU Professor of Chinese Law Jerome Cohen; Phillips Talbot, former Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East and South Asia, U.S. Ambassador to Greece, and President of the Asia Society of New York; Susan Bastress, now developing Middle East programs for the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and the first non-Qatari licensed to practice law in Doha; Frank Upham, former Vietnam correspondent for TIME magazine now teaching Chinese law at NYU Law School; Anthony Roisman, specialist in not-for-profit law and Managing Partner of the National Legal Scholars law firm; and Neal Millard, Professor of International Finance at the Gould School of Law, University of Southern California.

The Institute Executive
The Hazard Institute’s Executive Director is Peter Bird Martin, former Senior Editor of TIME magazine, former Executive Director of the American Universities Field Staff, and for the past 28 years Executive Director of The Institute of Current World Affairs and its international fellowship program.