Dan Magraw
United States
Expertise:
Law & Policy
President Emeritus and Former Executive Director
Daniel Magraw is an international lawyer with experience in international law, institutions, processes and policies, particularly relating to environmental protection, dispute settlement, investment and human rights, including climate change and environmental justice. He is professorial lecturer and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and president emeritus of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). Magraw teaches international environmental law and policy at SAIS, as well as human rights and environment at the University of Miami School of Law. He has worked in government, nongovernmental organizations, intergovernmental organizations, business and academia in the U.S. and abroad.
Magraw serves as a consultant to the United Nations regarding environment, human rights and investment. He served on the National Academies of Sciences committees on genetically engineered crops and on biologic confinement of genetically engineered organisms. He is on the boards of directors/trustees of three organizations: Lightbridge Corp., a publicly traded nuclear energy company; the Universal Rights Group, a human rights think tank in Geneva in which he is co-founded; and Human Rights Watch’s Advisory Committee on Environment and Human Rights, of which he is a co-chair. Previously, Magraw served on the advisory committee to the Law Library of Congress.
Magraw was the director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s International Environmental Law Office from 1992 to 2001 and acting principal deputy assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of International Activities in 2001. In 2000, Magraw co-chaired the White House assessment of the regulation of genetically engineered organisms. From 2002 through 2011, he was a member of the U.S. government’s Trade and Environment Policy Advisory Committee (TEPAC), spanning the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He has served on many US delegations to international negotiations and other meetings, often as a lead negotiator.
Magraw worked as an economist and business consultant in South India as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1968 to 1972. He developed the largest cooperative of its kind in India and, at the government of Tamil Nadu’s request, extended his stay for a third year to conduct an economic survey of rural markets.
Magraw was chair of the ABA International Law Section and has served in other leadership capacities in the ABA and other professional organizations, including chairing that section’s task forces on Magna Carta and on Carta de Foresta (Charter of the Forest or Charter of the Commons). He was a member of the United Kingdom’s Magna Carta 800th Commemoration Committee.
Magraw practiced international and civil liberties law at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C., where he also worked for six months doing poverty law at the Neighborhood Legal Service Program. He also served as counsel for India in the Kishenganga Arbitration over water in Kashmir brought by Pakistan under the Indus Waters Treaty.
He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Colorado and at Georgetown University Law Center. He has written many books and articles, lectured widely and won local, national and international awards, including the Elizabeth Haub Prize, the world’s premier environmental law award, presented in Stockholm by the speaker of the Swedish Parliament.
Magraw has a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was editor-in-chief of the California Law Review and a co-founder of the Berkeley Law Foundation, which funds legal work for disadvantaged people00 and communities and has been replicated at other law schools. He has a bachelor's degree in economics from Harvard University.