Public Biography
Dr. Lorraine Kessler-Pfaff is a professor of international boundary law at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, specializing in riparian sovereignty disputes — the legal and diplomatic questions that arise when rivers serve as international borders.
Dr. Kessler-Pfaff received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her Ph.D. in international relations from the London School of Economics. She has served as a legal consultant to the International Court of Justice on three boundary disputes involving shared waterways, and she is the author of The River Is Not Neutral: Water, Territory, and the Failure of Joint Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, 2020), a comprehensive study of every instance in which two nations have attempted to share a river as a border, all of which, she demonstrates, ended badly.
She has been described by colleagues as “the leading pessimist on shared waterways” and has accepted this characterization as “empirically accurate.”