Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Yale Law '90: Alex Whiting
I'm finding that in digging up old classmates to talk about, I'm never tempted to say that someone was unimpressive or quiet in law school. The truth is that they all seemed brilliant and sophisticated and somewhat intimidating, given that my own background at that point was serving as a process server and flower delivery guy in Detroit.
Alex Whiting has done a lot of amazing things. After law school, he clerked for a federal judge in the Eastern District of New York and then served as a federal prosecutor for ten years in DC (with DOJ's Civil Rights Division) and in Boston (for the US Attorney).
That's when things got interesting (not that being a federal prosecutor isn't interesting--believe me, it is!). In 2002 he became a prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague, and prosecuted a veritable rogue's gallery of war criminals, including Dragomir Milosevic. Later he served as the investigations coordinator for the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
In 2013, Alex returned to the US and joined the faculty at Harvard Law School, where he teaches criminal classes and works with the students there in a variety of settings. I have been lucky enough to collaborate a few times with Alex in the last several years: once on a debate with Rich Sullivan at Harvard, and again when I went up to Cambridge to work with his clinic students on clemency.
Right now, though, Alex is on leave. Why? Because he is spending the next few years as the Head of Investigations for the Special Prosecutors Office on Kosovo. There are few people with his skill set, and it is consistent with his character that he is using those skills for the common good.
