Cara Robertson ’97 has helped to define international criminal law.

Cara Robertson ‘97 never imagined that she would be sitting across from Slobodan Milosevic. But there she was at The Hague in January––an associate legal officer to the Appeals Chamber of the War Crimes Tribunal–-listening to the prosecutors’ request to consolidate the three indictments against the Serbian strongman into one megatrial. Robertson was advising the five judges on the panel who had to rule on tills particular question. She is one of the few Americans working for the chambers, though a number work for the prosecutors and defense attorneys. (As a lawyer in the prosecutors’ office, Sarah Kurtin ’99 actually helped research the request to join the indictments.) 

The Tribunal’s work on this and other cases, arising from the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, is defining the nature of international law. As part of this mission, Robertson has struggled with some of the challenges firsthand. “So much of this law is unsettled, inchoate,” she explains. “There’s very little precedent, and where there is precedent, it’s not binding.” Adding to the complexity is the Tribunal’s task offusing civil law and common law traditions into one coherent system of justice. 

The appeal to join the Milosevic case highlights the difficulties. It turned on an interpretation of a provision in the Tribunal’s Rules of Procedure and Evidence, which is written differently in the English version than in the French version-though both are authoritative. Did the crimes charged in the indictments committed in different places-Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia-over almost a decade constitute the “same transaction” under the tribunal’s rules? Milosevic’s refusal to participate in the proceedings only added to the question’s difficulty. Ultimately the panel decided to roll the charges into one trial, setting the stage for what is arguably the most significant exercise of international criminal law since Nuremberg. 

Robertson, who is scheduled to be a visiting scholar at the Law School in 2003, was known at Stanford for her scholarly work on the Lizzie Borden trial, about which she’s writing a book for Random House. After Law School, she was a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. Shortly after her term ended, she stopped by the office of Theodor Meron, who had just been named a judge on the Tribunal. A few minutes into the conversation she realized she was in a job interview. Robertson has an impressive understanding ofD.S. criminal law-a talent that Meron was looking for in an advisor. But she also volunteered to him that she had taken no classes in international law. Stili, she may have eased any concerns he had by talking with authority about sentencing challenges under international law. For her fluency on that subject, she credits her Supreme Court co clerk and classmate Allison Marston Danner ’97, now a law professor at Vanderbilt, who had shared the draft of an article she had written on the subject. (It appears in 87 Virginia La7v Review 415). 

The time Robertson has spent at The Hague has been tiring. “In the last year I have heard in excruciating detail some of the most horrible things that people do to each other,” she says. “The least we can do is listen to these stories and try to achieve some measure of justice.”