Before entering academia on a full time basis in 1989, Alvarez was an attorney adviser with the Office of the Legal Adviser of the US Department of State where he worked on cases before the Iran-US Claims Tribunal, served on the negotiation teams for bilateral investment treaties and the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, and was the legal adviser to the administration of justice program in Latin America coordinated by the Agency of International Development. Educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and Oxford University, Alvarez has also been in private practice and was a judicial clerk to the late Hon. Thomas Gibbs Gee of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. He has taught in NYU’s Singapore program at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and serves on the Advisory Panel of Centre for International Law located at NUS. He has also taught undergraduate students at NYU Abu Dhabi. He has delivered a number of endowed lectures at universities in the United States and abroad and delivered the General Course on international law at the Xiamen Academy of International Law in 2013 in Xiamen, China.

Alvarez’s activities outside of academe include memberships in the Council on Foreign Relations, the US Department of State’s Advisory Committee on Public International Law, and service on the board of the Center for Reproductive Rights, as special adviser on public international law to the International Criminal Court’s first prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, and as an expert witness in a number of investor-state arbitrations. Prof. Alvarez is the lead faculty director for NYU’s US-Asia Law Institute and is the faculty director of the International Legal Studies LLM specialization. Professor Alvarez was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2021.

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