Anna Spain Bradley is an author, award-winning legal scholar, higher education leader and globally recognized human rights expert.
She holds the MacArthur Foundation Chair in International Justice and Human Rights and is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law who has spent two decades studying the role law plays in promoting peace, dignity and human rights around the world. She has over a decade of continuous leadership experience in higher education, including as UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.

Anna Spain Bradley is the author of Global Racism: A Challenge for the World (Oxford University Press, October 2026), articulating racism as a universally available form of oppression operating on a global scale that poses a serious threat to humanity. The book builds upon her law review article Human Rights Racism (2019) identifying racism as an undefined violation of human rights under international law. Spain Bradley’s first book Human Choice in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021) challenges traditional assumptions about rationality in legal decision making by introducing insights from neuroscience to the study of international legal and political decision making. She is also co-editor of International Dispute Resolution (3rd ed., Carolina Academic Press, 2021) and the author of numerous law review articles and essays on the United Nations Security Council, international courts, and the peaceful resolution of disputes. Professor Spain Bradley’s scholarship has been recognized with the 2018 Gamm Justice Award for outstanding contributions to justice and the 2014 Francis Lieber Award from the American Society of International Law for exceptional scholarship on the law of war.

Professor Spain Bradley has a distinguished record of international leadership and public service. In 2024, President Biden appointed Spain Bradley to the World Bank-ICSID Panel of Conciliators. In 2021, the United Nations appointed her as Legal Expert to the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee on the Elaboration of Complementary Standards on the prevention of racist and xenophobic discrimination. She has been a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Compensation Commission and has represented nations as legal counsel before the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal. She began her legal career as an Attorney-Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where she earned two Meritorious Honor Awards. Spain Bradley previously worked on climate change policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and international trade agreements at the U.S. Trade Representative's Office. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Law Institute, the American Society of International Law where she has been elected Vice President and Executive Council member and was a founding member of Mediators Beyond Borders International. She earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A. magna cum laude from Denison University. Based in Los Angeles, CA, Professor Spain Bradley has lived or worked in every continent except Australia and Antarctica. 

Drawing on over 20 years of experience in the public sector and in higher education, with time spent in senior leadership and in the C-Suite, Spain Bradley blends research-driven insights with real world experience to provide innovative keynote engagements for diverse audiences including leadership teams, employee retreats, boards, universities, and the collective community experience. Her speaking style is authentic, dynamic and inspiring.