Professor Allen Springer will explore how contemporary international institutions are responding to the challenges posed by a wave of populist and nationalist sentiment, which often challenges the relevance of the institutions themselves. How do institutions operating in such diverse arenas as security, humanitarian, and environmental policy absorb and adapt to these pressures and attempt to confront effectively issues ranging from major transboundary movements of people seeking political asylum to global climate change?

Springer is a scholar of international environmental law and policy, focusing on issues of multilateral environmental governance, particularly in a North American context. He is the author of The International Law of Pollution: Protecting the Global Environment in a World of Sovereign States, and Cases of Conflict: Transboundary Disputes and the Development of International Environmental Law. A graduate of Amherst College and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Springer joined the Bowdoin faculty in 1976, serving as Bowdoin’s Dean of Students from 1980-82 and chairing the department of government and legal studies on several occasions. Springer delivered the Karofsky Faculty Encore Lecture in 2002, and in 2006 received the Bowdoin Alumni Council Award for Faculty and Staff.

William Nelson Cromwell, a successful and nationally respected New York lawyer, established the professorship which bears his name as a gesture of admiration for the College which produced many of the men who worked for and with his law firm. Born in 1854, Cromwell rose quickly to prominence in the world of legal affairs in New York. The William Nelson Cromwell Chair was provided for in his estate upon his death in 1948. It is Bowdoin’s only chair designed essentially for prelaw study.

Free and open to the public.