Thank you. It is a privilege to stand before you today as your incoming President.
I will not pretend this is an ordinary moment to be taking on this role. We gather at a time when international law is under strain in ways we have not seen in generations. The foundational principles of the international order, the institutions we built to enforce them, the courts we entrusted to judge them—all are being tested, from many directions at once. Long-settled commitments are being discarded. Norms that seemed beyond question a decade ago are being debated again. The postwar international legal order can no longer be taken for granted.
And yet—I want to begin by saying this plainly—international law has never mattered more than it does right now.
Most of international law the public will never notice—the planes that cross continents and land safely, the ships that navigate the seas freely, the wars that do not happen. The law is most visible when it fails, so it most often enters public conversation when it is broken. That breeds an impression that the system is constantly being violated—when the truth is closer to the opposite.
You know international law is real, because you practice it every day. You negotiate the treaties. You arbitrate the disputes. You advise the governments. You represent the refugees. You train the next generation. It is not an abstraction to you. It is the texture of your working lives.
You know that when we defend international law, we are not defending a piece of parchment. We are defending the quiet architecture that makes modern life possible. We are defending a set of convictions built out of the hardest lessons of the last century: that might does not make right, that sovereignty is not a license, that human dignity does not stop at a border, and that peace is something states build together or do not have at all. We are defending the possibility of a peaceful and prosperous world.
Which brings me to this Society.
The American Society of International Law was founded in 1906. We were here for the First World War. We were here when the League of Nations rose—and when it fell. We were here when the world again descended into war, and as our members helped imagine and build the United Nations.
We have been through hard moments before. And through all of it, our mission has remained: to foster the study of international law, and to promote the establishment and maintenance of international relations on the basis of law and justice.
That mission is not a relic. It is an assignment. It is the assignment for this moment.
As your President, I commit to doing everything I can over the next two years to work with you to carry that mission forward.
And here is the reason I am hopeful.
We are a society of people who know that international law has never stood still—and that its hardest moments have often been its most generative. The United Nations, the Nuremberg principles, the Geneva Conventions—none of them existed before the crises that made them necessary. Every generation has added to the law, and ours will too. This is a moment for thinking big about what the law can be and what we can do to make the future better than the past.
Thank you for the trust you have placed in me. Let’s get to work.
