Terra Lawson-Remer

Terra Lawson-Remer is Assistant Professor of International Affairs at The New School, where she is chair of the University’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility. She is also Fellow for Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has previously served as a senior advisor for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Treasury during the first Obama administration.
Research
Lawson-Remer’s research focuses on opportunity and exclusion in the global economy. Lawson-Remer advocates for a broader understanding of property rights than is typically found in the economics of development and the importance of property security for all people the ensure an equitable human rights structure. She examines the income and distributional effects of laws and institutions; development, poverty and inequality; gender equity; natural resources and extractive industries; global economic governance and international economic law; economic & social rights; the interaction between democracy and growth; and property rights. She has written numerous academic and popular articles on these issues, and worked and conducted field studies in Latin America, North and East Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific.
SERF Index
Lawson-Remer is a co-creator of the Social & Economic Rights Fulfillment (SERF) index, which aspires to revolutionize rights development research by measuring governmental capacity alongside rights fulfillment and author of the forthcoming book Fulfilling Economic & Social Rights (with Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Susan Randolph, Oxford University Press).
Activism
While a teenager in San Diego, Lawson-Remer challenged the constitutionality of the city’s teen curfew law through an ACLU lawsuit, winning in the Ninth Circuit.
During undergraduate studies at Yale, she organized for the United Farm Workers, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Student Labor Action Coalition, and United Students Against Sweatshops. She later co-founded STARC (Students Transforming and Resisting Corporations), a national grassroots student organization that advocated for corporate responsibility in the face of increased globalization and greater public accountability by the World Bank, IMF, and WTO. While leading STARC, she planned and participated in several national protests and demonstrations, and was arrested at the Battle in Seattle during the WTO meetings in 1999. She was also on the coordinating committee that organized the first major antiwar mobilization against a unilateral US military response to 9/11, calling instead for a global partnership approach, drawing 80,000 participants to Washington D.C. on April 20, 2002.
While at NYU School of Law, she worked with the Ruckus Society, the Rainforest Action Network, and Forest Ethics, and also founded Operation Sibyl to oppose the foreign policies of the Bush administration, directing the team that rappelled down the side of the Plaza Hotel two days before the 2004 Republican Convention in NYC to hang a 40x60 foot banner with the words “Truth” and “Bush” pointing in opposite directions, garnering international media coverage.
As a member of the faculty at The New School, Lawson-Remer is the chair of the Advisory Committee for Investor Responsibility (ACIR).
Media & Public Engagements
In 2011, Lawson-Remer spoke at The Economist's Buttonwood Gathering on Understanding the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The Economist also featured her work in "Property and the Lady". She has also been interviewed on newswire.fm for their philanthrocapitalism series.
On May 9, 2014, Lawson-Remer spoke about the Resource Curse in Papau New Guinea on Vice news.
She spoke at The Women: Inspiration & Enterprise (WIE) Network conference in 2012 in a panel on Empowering Women and Girls in the Developing World.
At the Consulate General of France in New York, she spoke alongside Theirry Soret of the UNDP on the topic of French and American Development Aid Policies.
Lawson-Remer has been a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) blog, and CFR's Development Channel. Work from the CFR blog has also been featured in Economists for Peace and Security (EPS) Quarterly, Devex, Project Concern International, and Political Ration.
Career
Lawson-Remer was appointed a senior advisor for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Treasury through the CFR IAF program. In this capacity, she worked on economic governance challenges of the Arab Spring; cooperation with China on economic development in Africa; infrastructure investment in emerging economies; and regional integration, trade, and, foreign investment in East Africa.
She previously held positions at the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), Latham & Watkins, Amnesty International, the Ethical Globalization Initiative, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and USAction, and served as a consultant for the World Bank and the United Nations.
Publications
Books
She has also co-authored Pathways to Freedom: Political and Economic Lessons from Democratic Transitions (with Isobel Coleman, Council on Foreign Relations Press).
Education
She earned her B.A. from Yale, and her J.D. and Ph.D. from New York University.
Personal life
Lawson-Remer was born in San Diego, California, and graduated from La Jolla High School in 1996.

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