Peter Weiss

President, Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy

Peter Weiss is Vice-President, former President, of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms and its US affiliate, the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy; Vice-President, Federation Internationale des ligues des Droits de l'Homme; and Vice-President, Center for Constitutional Rights. Mr. Weiss is a graduate of Yale Law School and has lectured and written widely on the international law of war and peace, nuclear weapons and human rights. He was the principal author of the draft brief on the illegality of threat or use of nuclear weapons used by many countries in making written submissions to the International Court of Justice in the 1996 nuclear weapons advisory opinion, and served as counsel to Malaysia at the hearings. He has published several articles on the ICJ opinion, including in the fall 1997 issue of Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems. Mr. Weiss is also a leading human rights lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and litigated the seminal case establishing the right of victims of torture to sue their torturers in US courts (Filartiga v. Pena-Irala). Since his retirement in 1996 from Weiss Dawid Fross Zelnick & Lehrman, a leading trademark firm, he has been Senior Intellectual Property Counsel to The Chanel Company Limited. He is also a founder and former President of the American Committee on Africa and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. He has also long been an activist for peace in the Middle East and is currently a member of the Arab-Jewish Peace Group in New York and of the Executive Committee of Americans for Peace Now, which supports the Peace Now movement in Israel.

Saul Mendlovitz

Vice-President, Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy

Saul Mendlovitz is Dag Hammarskjold Professor of Peace and World Order Studies at the Rutgers University School of Law and Co-Director of the World Order Models Project (WOMP). He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Arms Control Association, a former consultant for the Social Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Vice-President of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, and represents four organizations at the U.N.: the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA), the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy (LCNP), the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), and the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF). He has written extensively on security matters and issues relevant to promoting a just world order. His most recent publications include: Preferred Futures for the United Nations; "The Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" and; "Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons: a Narrative of Affirmative and Judge Weeremantry’s Grotian Quest." Prof. Mendlovitz along with Randall Forsberg, Director of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies and Ambassador Jonathan Dean, are U.S. members of an international consortium who are promoting a world-wide project, Global Action to Prevent War.

Staff Member Bios

John Burroughs

Executive Director, Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy

John Burroughs is a specialist on treaty regimes and international law relating to nuclear and other non-conventional weapons. He represents LCNP in Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) review proceedings, the United Nations, and other international forums. In 1998, Dr. Burroughs represented LCNP at the negotiations on the International Criminal Court in Rome, and in 1995, he was the nongovernmental legal coordinator at the hearings on nuclear weapons before the International Court of Justice. Dr. Burroughs is co-editor of Rule of Power or Rule of Law? An Assessment of U.S. Policies and Actions Regarding Security-Related Treaties, Apex Press, 2003, to which he contributed the chapter on the NPT, and author of The Legality of Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons: A Guide to the Historic Opinion of the International Court of Justice, Transaction Publishers, 1998. He has published articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the World Policy Journal, most recently co-authoring "Arms Control Abandoned: The Case of Biological Weapons" (World Policy Journal, summer 2003). He is an adjunct professor of international law at Rutgers Law School, Newark, where he teaches a seminar on legal controls on weapons of mass and indiscriminate destruction. He has a J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. from Harvard.

Alyn Ware

International Coordinator, Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy

A national of Aotearoa-New Zealand, Alyn has worked for years promoting peace and the planetary interest. As Executive Director of the Lawyers' Committee, he was a key figure in the World Court Project, a board member of the NGO Committee on Disarmament, a steering committee member of the Middle Powers Initiative, Pacific Representative for the International Peace Bureau, executive committee member of Peace Movement Aotearoa (PMA), and a steering committee member of the International Abolition 2000 Movement.

Alyn's publishing history is no less impressive. Among his credits is co-authorship of the Nuclear Weapons Convention. Alyn has also traveled widely and spoken before numerous conferences.

Before coming to the LCNP, Alyn worked in Aotearoa-New Zealand as a Kindergarten teacher and peace activist-organizer. He initiated the Mobile Peace Van Society, Waikato Campus Peace Group, Youth Peace Network, Our Planet in Every Classroom, Peace Walk for a Nuclear Free New Zealand, and War Toy Amnesty.

Michael Spies

Research Associate, Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy

Michael Spies is a research associate for the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, New York. For the past three years he has carried out research and analysis projects for LCNP on topics ranging from the U.S. arms control/disarmament commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to Iran’s nuclear program and its relationship with the IAEA. Prior to joining LCNP, he worked for the Los Alamos Study Group, Albuquerque, New Mexico, a non-profit which monitors the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory. He is a 2003 graduate of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.