Donald Francis Donovan

Donald Francis Donovan, the current President-Elect of ASIL, is a partner in the New York office of Debevoise & Plimpton. He has argued international law in a broad range of international and domestic fora, including the International Court of Justice and the US Supreme Court. He regularly appears as both counsel and arbitrator in proceedings initiated under the auspices of the world's leading arbitral institutions and litigates international disputes in U.S. courts. For his achievements in both international arbitration and international human rights, he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Jurisprudencia by the Mexican Bar Association, the first non-Mexican so honored, and was inducted as a member of the Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca, the highest award given by the Government of Mexico to non-Mexicans.

Mr. Donovan currently serves on the Advisory Committee for the Restatement of the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration of the American Law Institute, as a Member of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration (ICCA), having recently completed two terms as its Vice-President, and as a member of the Board of Directors of Human Rights First and Chair of its Litigation Committee. He formerly served as Chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration. He teaches international commercial and treaty arbitration at New York University School of Law.

Mr. Donovan served as law clerk to Associate Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the US Supreme Court and legal assistant to Judge Howard M. Holtzmann of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal. He received his B.A. in 1977 from the University of Virginia and his J.D. in 1981 from Stanford Law School.