Roger Clark (5)

Roger S. Clark is the former editor-in-chief of Criminal Law Forum and Board of Governors Professor of Law at Rutgers University in Camden. A New Zealander by birth, Professor Clark has taught international law and criminal law at Rutgers since 1972.

He served as a member of the United Nations Committee on Crime Prevention and Control between 1987 and 1990.
Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 1972, he worked for the New Zealand Justice Department and Ministry of Foreign Affairs; taught law in New Zealand; served as an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and Doctoral Fellow at the Columbia University School of Law; interned at the United Nations; and taught at the law school of the University of Iowa.

In 1995 and 1996, he represented the Government of Samoa in arguing the illegality of nuclear weapons before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Since 1995, he has represented Samoa in negotiations to create the International Criminal Court and to get the Court running successfully. He was very active in Court’s Special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression which had the task of drafting an amendment to the Court’s Statute to activate its nascent jurisdiction over the crime of aggression.

In 2014-2016, he was a member of the legal team representing the Marshall Islands in its cases against the states possessing nuclear weapons for failure to disarm. These cases were ultimately dismissed on procedural grounds by an evenly-divided International Court of Justice in The Hague. The team was nominated, unsuccesfully, for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize.