Mr. David Caron is the C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor of Law and co-director of the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. He is an expert in international law and organization, focusing on public and private international dispute resolution, international courts and tribunals, the United Nations, the law of the sea, international environmental law, climate change, and general theory of international law.
In January 2013, David Caron was appointed dean of The Dickson Poon School of Law at King's College London. He is due to take up his appointment in mid-2013.
Caron is a member of the Global Agenda Council on the Rule of Law of the World Economic Forum, a member of the Executive Council of the American Bar Association Section on International Law, and a member of the U.S. Department of State Advisory Committee on Public International Law. He is co-director of the Law of the Sea Institute, an international consortium of scholars that has played a major part in studies of ocean law since the 1970s, and a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law. Caron is immediate past president of the American Society of International Law, and a former chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration.
Caron has served as director of studies (1987), director of research (1995) and as a lecturer (2006) at the Hague Academy of International Law. He received the 1991 Deak Prize of the American Society of International Law for outstanding scholarship by a younger academic. He has served as chair of the International Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, a member of the precedent panel of the U.N. Compensation Commission for claims arising out of the Gulf War, counsel for Ethiopia before the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission, president of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes Tribunal in the matter of Aguas del Tunari v. The Republic of Bolivia, and a member of the NAFTA Chapter 11 Arbitration Panels in the matters of Glamis Gold v. The United States and Cargill Industries v. The United States of Mexico.
In 2000, he received the Stefan A. Riesenfeld Award of the University of California for outstanding achievement and contribution to the field of international law.