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Ingrid (Wuerth) Brunk

Helen Strong Curry Chair in International Law
Director, Cecil D. Branstetter Litigation & Dispute Resolution Program

Ingrid Brunk is a leading scholar of foreign relations, public international law and transnational litigation. She joined Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 2007, was appointed director of the International Legal Studies Program in 2009 and was appointed director of the Branstetter Litigation & Dispute Resolution Program in 2018. She was named to the newly endowed Helen Strong Curry Chair in International Law in 2015 and has served as the Law School’s Associate Dean for Research and in other leadership positions at Vanderbilt.

Professor Brunk is currently co-editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law. She is a member of the American Law Institute and was named as a Reporter for the Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. She has received numerous honors and fellowships, including the Morehead Scholarship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Fulbright Senior Scholar award, the German Chancellor's Fellowship, election to the German Society of International Law, election to the Order of the Coif, and many teaching awards. She clerked for Judge Jan E. DuBois in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and for Judge Jane Roth on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The VLS Class of 2018 elected Brunk to give its commencement address. She is a contributing editor at Lawfare and a founding editor of the Transnational Litigation Blog.

Research Interests

Territorial conflicts, state-owned enterprises, immunity, jurisdiction, human rights

Area(s) of Expertise

Public international law, foreign relations law, transnational litigation, civil procedure


Representative Publications

  • “Russia, Ukraine, and the Future World Order," American Journal of International Law (2022) (with Monica Hakimi)
  • “The Due Process and Other Constitutional Rights of Foreign States,” 88 Fordham Law Review 633 (2019)
    Full Text | SSRN
  • “Immunity from Execution of State-Owned Banks” in Cambridge Handbook on the International Law of Immunity (2019)
    Full Text | SSRN
  • "The Future of the Federal Common Law of Foreign Relations," 106 Georgetown Law Journal 1825 (2018)
    Full Text | SSRN
  • “Compliance” in Fundamental Concepts for International Law – The Construction of a Discipline (2018) (d’Aspremont and Singh, editors)
  • “International Law in the Post-Human Rights Era,” 96 Texas Law Review 279 (2017)
    Full Text | SSRN
  • U.S. Foreign Relations Law: Cases, Materials, Simulations (with Sean D. Murphy and Edward T. Swaine) (5th edition, 2017)
  • “The Normalization of Foreign Relations Law,” 128 Harvard Law Review 1897 (2015) (with Ganesh Sitaraman)
    Full Text | WWW
  • “The Supreme Court and the Alien Tort Statute: Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum,” 107 American Journal of International Law 601 (2013)
    Full Text | SSRN | JSTOR
  • "Pinochet's Legacy Reassessed," 106 American Journal of International Law 731 (2012)
    Full Text | HEIN