2025 Davis Wright Tremaine International Law Writing Competition Winners Announced

The International Law Committee has announced Natalie Lerner ’25 and Timothy Martell ’25 as its 2025 Davis Wright Tremaine International Law Writing Award winners for their papers in international law. The award, established through the generosity of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, provides $2,500 and $1,000 stipends for the best and second-best written international law research papers.

Natalie Lerner’s paper, titled “From Territorial Integrity to Tent Camping: State Responsibility and Indigenous Land Rights for the Emberá of Colombia,” explores the potentially successful avenues in international human rights law through which the Emberá could challenge their decades of mistreatment and displacement from their homelands in Colombia’s Pacific Region. Inspired by her recent visit to Bogotá, Colombia, her paper documents the forces driving the Emberá off their land, the two realms of international human rights law that could ensure state responsibility and indigenous land rights for the Emberá. It concludes with an exploration of the tensions between individual and collective human rights in the context of indigenous communities, with a specific focus on the Emberá. Her paper advocates that the state of Colombia bears responsibility for the displacement of the Embera, and through international human law, how the indigenous community can assert its rights.

Timothy Martell’s paper, “The Right to Unionize and the Right to Strike: A Critique of the Jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights,” provided a look at the political and economic context of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Critiquing the Velasquez-Rodriguez v. Honduras, Martell describes the case as “U.S.-backed agents influencing Latin American states to kill political dissidents associated with trade unionism.” Martell thanks Professor Maloney for allowing him to research this case in her International Human Rights Course, and was inspired by his research on contemporary Latin American politics and economics while in graduate school.

Both papers were completed under the supervision of Professor Kathleen Maloney, whom Lerner and Martell thank for her generous and insightful guidance.