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Kal Raustiala
Director
Department:
UCLA Law
1242 School of Law
385 Charles E. Young Dr. East
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Campus Mail Code: 147602
Phone: 310-794-4856
Email:
raustiala@law.ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Law
Kal Raustiala is the Promise Institute Distinguished Professor of Comparative and International Law at UCLA Law School and a Professor at the UCLA International Institute, where he teaches in the Program on Global Studies. He is also the Director of the UCLA Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations. Professor Raustiala's research focuses on international law, international relations, and intellectual property. He received the
Arthur Ross Silver Medal book award of the Council on Foreign Relations
for his most recent book, The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire (Oxford, 2023). Other recent publications include “More Territory, More Trouble: Can Trump Seize Greenland?” Just Security (2025); “Normative Contestation in the International Order: Is China Remaking Global Governance?” International Law Studies (2025); “Who Gets a Nation?” Noema (2024); “Why the United Nations Still Matters,” Foreign Affairs (2023); "The Fight Against China’s Bribe Machine,” Foreign Affairs, (2021); “NGOs in International Treatymaking,” in Duncan Hollis, ed, THE OXFORD GUIDE TO TREATIES, 2D EDITION (Oxford University Press, 2020); “Hollywood is Running Out of Villains,” Foreign Affairs, (2020); and “Innovation in the Information Age: The United States, China, and the Struggle Over Intellectual Property in the 21st Century,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law (2020). His books include Global Governance in a World of Change, edited with Michael Barnett and Jon Pevehouse (Cambridge, 2021); Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law (Oxford, 2009) and The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (Oxford, 2012), written with Chris Sprigman, which has been translated into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
In 2016 Professor Raustiala was elected Vice President of the American Society of International Law. He has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, Princeton University, the University of Chicago Law School, Melbourne University in Australia, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2016, he was the Yong Shook Lin Visiting Professor of Intellectual Property at the National University of Singapore. A graduate of Duke University, Professor Raustiala holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego.
Prior to coming to UCLA, Professor Raustiala was a research fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, a Peccei Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems in Austria, and an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Professor Raustiala has served on the editorial boards of International Organization and the American Journal of International Law and is a frequent media contributor whose writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Wired, Slate, the International Herald Tribune and Le Monde. Along with Catherine Amirfar of Debevoise & Plimpton, he is co-host of the American Society of International Law’s International Law Behind the Headlines podcast.