William Burke-White
Faculty Fellow
Bill Burke-White, an international lawyer and political scientist, is a leading expert on U.S. foreign policy, multilateral institutions, and international law. His work increasingly engages questions at the intersection of global governance, international economic law, and the energy transition.
He researches and writes on the relationships between law and politics in international affairs and has particular expertise on the design and implementation of complex global governance solutions that involve multiple countries, international institutions, and multilateral legal regimes. A significant strand of his current research examines how the architecture of international investment law shapes climate finance, stranded assets, and regulatory risk in a decarbonizing global economy. He is also developing a project on the use of domestic regulatory regimes—including export controls, investment screening, and industrial policy—to govern access to and trade in rare earth elements and other critical minerals essential to clean energy technologies. He has significant regional expertise on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, and continues to study how shifting global power dynamics affect the norms and structures of international law.
At Penn Carey Law, Burke-White teaches international investment law, international climate law, and international human rights law. His scholarship combines careful doctrinal analysis with attention to how international legal regimes evolve in response to changing economic conditions and geopolitical pressures.
Beyond Penn Carey Law, Burke-White is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in Waterloo, Canada. He advises governments, law firms, and individual clients on international law, with particular expertise in investor–state dispute settlement, and regularly serves as an expert witness in domestic and international litigation and arbitration, including as an expert on matters involving the law of the Russian Federation.
From 2014–2019, Burke-White served as the Inaugural Director of Perry World House, Penn’s interdisciplinary international affairs institute. Building Perry World House from the ground up, he established a policy think tank embedded within Penn’s academic community and drove research and policy engagement on the future of the global order and major global shifts, including urbanization, migration, and demography. From 2011–2014, he served as Deputy Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.
From 2009–2011, Burke-White served in the Obama administration on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, where he was principal drafter of the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, Secretary Clinton’s initiative to reform the Department of State and reshape U.S. foreign policy. He was responsible for issues related to U.S. engagement with international institutions, including the G-20, G-8, and the United Nations, as well as U.S. policy toward the Russian Federation.
Burke-White’s broader academic work sits at the intersection of international law and international relations. He has written widely on multilateralism, changing global power structures, human rights, international institutions, and international economic law. His scholarship appears in leading international legal journals, and he regularly offers commentary in major media outlets. He is currently completing a book project entitled “The New Geography of Global Governance and How International Law Got Lost.”
He holds bachelor’s and law degrees from Harvard University and a doctorate in international relations from Cambridge University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He has served as a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harvard Law School, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and Mofid University in Iran. In 2008, he received the A. Leo Levin Award, and in 2007 the Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2025, he was honored by the graduating LL.M. class with the LL.M. Teaching Award and was selected to serve as the class graduation speaker.