Staff

The Center’s staff

David C. Williams, Executive Director

David C. Williams graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School after earning the Sarah Sears Prize for being first in his class. Williams then clerked for Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and taught at Cornell Law School before relocating to Indiana University in 1991.

The Law School named him the John S. Hastings Professor of Law, and the University named him its Distinguished Faculty Research Lecturer in 2003. Williams has twice won the Wallace Teaching Award, as well as the Fromm Public Interest Faculty Award. He has taught at the University of Paris and lectured around the world. He was a member of the faculty of law at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at that university’s Wolfson College. He was also a fellow at the European University Institute in Fiesole.

Williams has written widely on constitutional design, Native American Law, the constitutional treatment of difference, and the relationship between constitutionalism and political violence. He is the author of The Mythic Meanings of the Second Amendment: Taming Political Violence in a Constitutional Republic (Yale University Press, 2003). He is also co-editor and primary author of Designing Federalism in Burma (UNLD Press 2005), which is widely read in the Burma democracy movement.

As Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy, Williams consults with a number of reform movements abroad. He advises many elements of the Burma democracy movement on the constitutional future of that country. He is a consultant to the government of Liberia on its constitutional revision process and has helped to write Liberia’s law reform and anti-corruption statutes. He is also the primary author of the first treatise on the meaning of the Liberian constitution. He has also advised reformers in Libya, Yemen, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Jordan, South Sudan, Ukraine, Ireland, and other countries.

Susan H. Williams, Director

Susan H. Williams graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as the supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review and earned the John Sears Award for being second in her class. She clerked for Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and taught first at Cornell Law School. She is the Walter W. Foskett Professor of Law at Indiana, where she has taught since 1991. Williams is the recipient of the Office of Women’s Affairs Distinguished Scholar Award (2000), the Wallace Teaching Award (2004), the Fromm Public Interest Faculty Award, and a Presidential Citation for Service to the Profession from the Indiana State Bar Association (2003).

She has taught at the University of Paris and served as a fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge University and at the European University Institute in Fiesole. She has been involved in judicial education on issues of feminist theory and critical race theory, both within Indiana and nationally. She has written two books: Constituting Equality: Gender Equality and Comparative Constitutional Law (Susan H. Williams, ed.) (Cambridge University Press 2009) and Truth, Autonomy, and Speech: Feminist Theory and the First Amendment (New York University Press 2004). She is also the author of numerous articles on constitutional law, particularly concerning freedom of speech and religion, and on feminist theory.

As director of the Center, Williams has been extensively involved in constitutional education and drafting with the Burmese democracy movement. She serves as a constitutional advisor to the Women’s League of Burma and the Women’s League of Chinland. She has also worked with the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia on constitutional reform issues in Liberia. And she serves as a constitutional advisor to the Democratic Party of Vietnam.

Hon. David F. Hamilton, Associate Director

Judge David Hamilton currently serves as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He was appointed to the Seventh Circuit by President Obama in 2009. Previously he was chief judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, and had been a district judge on that court since 1994. Judge Hamilton was formerly a partner at Barnes & Thornburg, a private law firm in Indianapolis.

He served as counsel to the Governor of Indiana from 1989 to 1991. Judge Hamilton served as law clerk to Judge Richard D. Cudahy on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and is a founding member of the Sagamore Inn of Court in the American Inns of Court. He served as a member of the Indiana State Recount Commission from 1986 to 1987 and as chairman of the Indiana State Ethics Commission from 1991 to 1994.

Timothy William Waters, Associate Director

Professor Waters's scholarly interests include the structure of the inter-state system, ethnic conflict, human rights, transitional justice, and comparative law, especially in European and Islamic contexts. His principal research involves re-defining self-determination to devise an effective right of peaceful secession. He has published extensively in leading journals of international law and international relations, including at Yale, Harvard, NYU, Virginia, and George Washington.

Waters is a frequent contributor to policy debate on international law and politics. His op-eds on Iraq, the Balkans, and international justice have appeared in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. He has presented his work to universities, government bodies, and institutes in the U.S., Europe, Iran, and Israel.

Waters has served as a consultant on legal system reform for the Open Society Institute, UNDP, and the Latvian Ministry of Justice, on ethnic discrimination for Human Rights Watch, and as a consultant to the defense on Padilla et al. He monitored implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords in Bosnia for the OSCE, and at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, he helped draft the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Hungary, where he first developed his interest in regulation of minority-majority conflicts.

During several research fellowships at Harvard Law School and graduate studies at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, Waters explored the interaction of law and ethnic conflict. He has also studied at the Lund University in Sweden and Bogazici University in Turkey, and visited at Boston University, the University of Mississippi, Bard College, and Central European University in Budapest.